^/ 



STUDIES 

IN 

RELIGION AND THEOLOGY 

THE CHURCH: 
IN IDEA AND IN HISTORY 



BY 



A. M. FAIRBAIRN, M.A., 

Late Principal of Mansfield College, 
D.D. . . . Edinburgh, Yale, Wales, Manchester, Gottingen, 

D.LlTT. . . . OXON AND LeEDS, 

LL D. . . . Aberdeen, 

Fellow of the British Academy, 

F.R.S.L., F.R.S.A., F.N.A. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1910 

All rights reiewed 






Copyright, 1910, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published February, 1910. 




CCI.A2f)6488 C 



Nornvood Press 

J. S. Gushing Co. — Berivick & Smith Co. 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



TO 

THE OLD MANSFIELD MEN, 

AS WELL AS THE MULTITUDES, WHO, WHILE 
IN OXFORD, 

WORSHIPPED IN OUR COLLEGE CHAPEL 
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED 



PASS ON THE WORD. 

As fiery cross from clan to clan 
Passed swift and sure from man to man, 
Pass on the Word ! 

The Word from ages past received, 
The Word that ages past believed, 
Pass on the Word ! 

The Word that tells of duty clear, 
The Word that tells of death so near, 
Pass on the Word ! 

In London slum, in opium den, 
On mountain side, on sea, or fen 
When fortune's wheel turns high, turns low. 
In sickness' ebb, in life's full flow, 
Pass on the Word ! 

Take up the message, pass it on 
To others as life's course is run, 
Run straight, run sure, and never cast 
The call aside, while life shall last, 
Pass on the Word ! 

E. L. C. 



PREFACE 

STUDIES '* is to me an old and familiar friend in the 
title of a book. I remember submitting a question, 
directly suggested by a first literary project, to a Professor, 
who later became Principal, in a northern university, 
viz. : — "What name would he give to a book made up of 
scientific 2ittempts to conceive and represent formulated ideas, 
not, indeed, according to their place in a system, but in 
the isolation which was independence ? " Without hesita- 
tion the answer came back : " would call it ' Studies.' " 
And when years later a kindred question was submitted, a 
kindred answer was returned. The name was not intended 
to qualify the ideas interpreted but the attempt at their 
interpretation ; and was equal to essay ^ in the old sense, 
better represented by assay than by any other modern 
term. This does not denote " a written composition 
shorter and less elaborate than a treatise," but simply an 
attempt to examine the ideas by their interpretation. And 
this is the meaning which is attached to the word 
"Studies." 

This book may seem too dogmatic to be fitly character- 
ized by so undogmatic a name. Though I confess that its 
basis is formed by a collection of scattered papers, yet it has 
become a treatise on the church. It is held, indeed, that 
the change has improved the volume, without essentially 

1 The sense is better represented by " Assay " than " Essay," which may 
be compared with the Latin " exagium," the old French " Essai," and 
Italian " Assaggio." 

vii 



Vlll PREFACE 

changing its character, for it expresses the ideas to which 
the Mansfield pulpit is dedicated. The two addresses from 
the Chair of the Congregational Union may be said to deal, 
respectively , with the church in the first and in the nine- 
teenth century. The paper read at Hanley covers certain 
points left out in the earlier discussions. The fourth paper, 
here printed as three, was in its original form an introduction 
to a jubilee volume, published by the Congregational Union, 
where it appeared as a discussion of Ecclesiastical Polity and 
the Religion of Christ. It was not intended here to change 
the papers, but to put in the notes any changes in the 
argument made necessary by later discussions and dis- 
coveries. This was abandoned, being found impossible of 
fulfilment. 

There is also embodied in the volume " Studies " in the 
New Testament idea of the church, preceded by one on its 
main function or worship. This is followed by others on 
its founders and its making. These are succeeded by others 
on the teaching of Jesus as the standard of the church's 
living. In the second of these is embodied a discussion 
of what Jesus intended His church to be ; and in a third 
an account of His passion as its foundation. There follow 
six chapters, three of which are occupied with Paul and 
three with John, the apostles being taken as specimens of 
the material Jesus used in building up His church. 

I have, for the rest, to confess my obligations to 
Mr. P. E. Mathison of New College, who has most 
patiently read and wisely amended much that was faulty 
in the style, and to my colleague in Mansfield, Mr. T. M. 
Watt, M.A., who has prepared the table of contents and 
drawn up the index. 

The poem which is published on page vi. has been sent to 
me by a friend. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 



Part I 



PAGE 



I. THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION IN THE FIRST 
CENTURY 3-46 



1. The inexhaustible significance of Christ shown in the multi- 

tude of churches . 3 

2. A Free church may be national, but not established . . 4 

3. The triumph of the Spirit of Christ hindered by the dis- 

loyalty of the churches to His law 5 



II 

The normative character of the first century for Christian 
life and thought ; the fascination of Christ for the follow- 
ing centuries . 

The ministry of Christ set problems whose grandeur was 
but dimly disclosed to the apostles 

The revolution effected in the religious outlook of humanity 
by the life and teaching of Jesus— The creative years of 
the religion, 30 to 90 A. D. . 



Ill 

1. Jesus and Paul — The central place of Christ in the Pauline 

Christology 13 

2. The universalism of Christianity 15 

3. Christianity denied the sufficiency of the old religions ; 

its denials were based on a splendid positivism . . 17 
ix 



CONTENTS 
IV 



PAGE 



1. The grandeur of Christ's aims and the seeming inadequacy 

of the men He chose to carry on His work . . -19 

2. In Paul the culture of the Grseco-Roman world mingles 

with the intense religious convictions of the Hebrew race 22 



The Gospel the Apostles preached : the place held by the 

Cross 24 

" The doctrine of the Cross," though abhorrent to both Jew 
and Greek, yet the kernel of the Christian message . . 27 

The Cross stood as the symbol and manifestation in time of 
the eternal love and sacrifice of God .... 28 

The response in human life and faith to the altered concep- 
tion of God — The freedom of His sons . , ... 29 



VI 

1. The circumstances of the age in which Christianity ap- 

peared : its deliverance from the limitations of the Jewish 
faith 32 

2. The political condition — The unity of the Roman Empire 

—The rights of Roman citizens ..... 32 

3. The ancient moral ideals viewed in relation to the moral life 

of the first century 34 

4. Its attitude to rehgion ; religion socially useful, though 

impotent as a moral guide— Gibbon quoted ... 36 



VII 

1. The heroic task essayed by the early church in its conflict 

with the Roman Empire . 39 

2. The change effected in man's conception of the universe 

and of God . 42 

3. The consequent moral and social changes .... 43 

4. The secret of their success ; the supreme doctrine was the 

doctrine of the Cross 44 



CONTENTS XI 

II. THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION IN THE NINE- page 
TEENTH CENTURY . . . . . . . 47-108 

I 

1. The churches and the ideal of Jesus 47 

2. The good and the evil inherited by the churches from the 

past 48 

3. The progressive nature of the divine ideal in the churches . 49 

4. The responsibihty of the churches ; critical attitude of the 

modern mind towards traditional beliefs .... 49 



II 

The aim of the address — to consider the relation of the 
Christian Religion to our age ...... 50 

Religion defined : signifies the action of God — Works in 
all the churches 51 



III 

1. The gradual triumph of the Christian faith in the centuries 

following the apostolic age ..... 52 

2. The religion of Christ greater than any single ecclesiastical 

institution — The moral and spiritual ideals of the City of 
God not fulfilled in a political society like the Roman 
church, however great its services to religion may other- 
wise be . . . . . . . . . -55 

3. The revolt of reason and conscience against the political 

and sacerdotal ideal of the church : liberty as the true 
atmosphere for a personal faith 58 

4. The effort of rationalism to construct a natural religion as 

the "truth " of historical religions ..... 60 

5. The continued progress of man depends on the increasing 

power of his rehgion — Christian ideal meets and har- 
monizes with the ideal immanent in the race . . .61 



IV 

1. Christianity a living faith for the men of to-day . . 64 

2. Its problems to-day more complex and radical than ever . 66 



XU CONTENTS 

V 

THE ATTITUDE OF THE AGE TO CHRISTIANITY. 



PAGE 



1. The religious spirit of to-day active, philanthropic, mis- 

sionary 67 

2. The modern spirit of philanthropy illustrated and contrasted 

with the ethical spirit of the age of Tacitus ... 68 

VI 

THE IDEAL OF CHRISTIANITY 

1. The attitude of the intellectual classes of our day to the 

Christian religion — Agnosticism — ^stheticism . . 72 

2. Yet Christianity has ever claimed the finest intellects, and 

the eighteenth century can set Leibniz, Butler, and Kant 
over against sceptical Voltaire. Sadness accompanies loss 
of faith — e.g. Matthew Arnold 74 

3. The attitude of the industrial and labouring classes to reli- 

gion — Their estrangement from the churches • - - 77 

VII 

WHAT SHOULD BE THE ATTITUDE OF THE CHURCHES TO 
THESE TENDENCIES? 

1. The modern intellectual movement may be called a heathen 

revival — The terms of its thought naturalistic ... 79 

2. Lucretius and the modern naturalistic thinkers compared — 

Their theory of the origin of the universe and of religion 82 

3. The thought most opposed to Christianity is ancient— philo- 

sophical decadence — Renan and Matthew Arnold repre- 
sent in modern times the critical spirit of Celsus . ' . 84 

4. Christian elements in the modern intellect — The struggle 

towards a religious interpretation of the world — Rever- 
ence and humanity of the modern mind ... 86 

VIII 

1. The conflict of views as regards religion— The appeal to 

pietism ignores the character of the problem — Religion 

as the admiration of the Altogether Good ... 88 

2. The view of nature and man as construed by science . .90 

3. The Christian conception of nature and man ... 92 



CONTENTS Xm 

IX 
RELIGION AND THE INDUSTRIAL CLASSES 

PAGE 

1 . Estrangement of these classes owing to lack of interest in 

the churches for their welfare — The churches need to 
translate the principles of Christ into the creation of a 
new order 95 

2. Christianity seeks to create good social conditions for all 

men^ — Its attitude to capital and labour .... 97 

3. This plea urged upon the church as its duty in doing the 

will of Christ ......... 99 

X 

THE DUTIES AND IDEALS OF THE CHURCHES 

1. The responsibility of the churches to Christ . . .100 

2. The church that best interprets the religion of Christ will 

secure for it the most victorious hfe .... loi 

3. Established churches contrasted with Free . . .102 

4. Free churches must have a positive note in their creeds . 104 

5. The spiritual ancestry of the Christian minister . . . 106 



III. THE SACERDOTAL AND THE PURITAN IDEA 109-141 

The opposed conceptions of the church reduced to two : 
the Sacerdotal and the Puritan . . . . .109 



I 

1. The Congregational polity an outcome of its spiritual prin- 

ciple . . . . . . . . . . .Ill 

(i) Independency, though far from triumphant in the 
seventeenth century, was rich in great men and 

great ideas 1 1 1 

(ii) Political liberty affords opportunity for the exercise 

of spiritual principles . . . . . .114 

2. The Evangelical revival and English religious thought — 

The Anglo-Catholic movement . . . . . .116 



XIV CONTENTS 

II 

THE NEW PURITANISM AND THE NEW SACERDOTALISM 

PAGE 

1. Differences between Episcopacy and Independency more 

fundamental than those expressed in their relationship to 

the State ii8 

2. The Anglican church is essentially sacerdotal . . . iiq 

3. Sacerdotalism, as exemplified in the Anglican church ; its 

polity and its clerical orders held to be of divine origin ; 
the episcopate " necessary not merely to its bene esse^ 
but to its ^jj-^ " 122 

in 

1, Such a system viewed as interpreting the mind of our Lord 123 

2. Justice must be done, however, to the spirit and inspiration 

of the New Sacerdotalism 124 

IV 

1. The aim of both movements — the new Sacerdotalism and 

the new Puritanism — the same, the reconciliation of 
men to God through Jesus Christ 125 

2. But Sacerdotalism {a) limits the universality of Divine Grace, 

{b) and conditions the grace of God on imperfect men ; 
"There is one God, and one Mediator between God 
and man" . .126 

V 

1. Sacerdotalism magnifies the church, Puritanism magnifies 

God . 12a 

2. The channels of God's grace as infinite as His ways . .129 

3. The conditions of approach spiritual and ethical, not sen- 

suous and formal 131 

VI 

1. We must endeavour to present Christianity in Christ's 

way : 

(i) The Christian Society a brotherhood which knew no 

priesthood 132 

(ii) Its ideal : the churches related to the kingdom as 

means to an end 134 

2. The chief figures in the early church — Paul's apostleship 

due to the direct vocation of God . . . . -135 



CONTENTS XV 

VII 

1. The priesthood of all believers . . . . . . 137 

2. Loyalty to a church may be disloyalty to God . . .139 

3. Congregationalism must awaken to a sense of its large 

mission 140 

IV. ECCLESIASTICAL POLITY AND THE RELIGION 
OF CHRIST . . 142-175 

I 

1. The ideal of the Congregational polity sketched . .142 

2. The terms Congregational and Independent : the N. T. 

term iKKK-qcrla . . . . . . . . .144 

3. The independence claimed from external control ; the Con- 

gregational principle of the sole authority of Christ — 
Independency means freedom 147 

II 

Ecclesiastical polities maybe (i) Autocratic, (2) Episcopal, 
(3) Presbyterian, (4) Communal 151 

1. The autocracy may be (a) civil, as in the Russo-Greek 

Church, or (/3) ecclesiastical, as in the Roman Catholic 
Church 151 

2. Episcopacy as illustrated in the Roman and the Anglican 

Churches 151 

3. The Presbyterian poHty — Milton at first a Presbyterian ; 

later an Independent 152 

4. The " Communal" polity to be further treated of . .155 

III 

1. The polity of a church must be judged by the religion in 

its purest form, or its ability to realize the ends for which 

the religion stands 155 

2. Church polities either Monarchical or Republican . .156 

IV 

1. The contrast of Catholicism with the Christianity of Christ 

— His "priesthood" in the Epistle to the Hebrews . 157 

2. The Primitive church neither sacerdotal nor organized into 

a single body politic 161 



XVI CONTENTS 

V 

PAGE 

1. English scholars on the question of the episcopate in the 

apostolic age — Hatch's Bampton Lectures and Lightfoot's 
Essay on The Christian Ministry 162 

2, The divine right of episcopacy and historical criticism . 168 

VI 

1. (a) The moral ideal in Judaism is social, and is intended for 

man as man : (/S) the ceremonial law is limited to a class, 

the priesthood 170 

2. (7) Jesus Himself is the new law for the Christian ; (5) love of 

Him the new motive for its fulfilment . . . .173 

3. Christian ethics neither legal nor ascetic, but social . -174 



V. HOW THE RELIGION OF CHRIST GREW INTO 
CATHOLICISM 176-204 

I 

1. The evidence from Clement of Rome as to the place of 

" bishops " at Rome and Corinth . . . . .176 

2. In the epistles of Ignatius the bishop is the symbol of order, 

and in the Clementine homilies he is the depository of 
theological truth. Both these tendencies unite in 
Irenaeus . . . 178 

II 

1. The emphasis of the Ignatian epistles compared with that 

in the Pauhne letters 180 

2. In the Clementine literature we have the Ebionitic version 

of the apostolic history 181 

III 

1. Development of Episcopacy more rapid in the East than in 

the West 183 

2. The gradual hardening of the distinction between K\7ipo% 

and Xaos . . . . . . . , . .186 

3. The influence both of Judaism and of Greek religion in the 

growth of sacerd>V.al ideas in the church . . .187 

/ 



CONTENTS XVll 

IV 

PAGE 

1. Tertullian and Cyprian cited as bearing witness to the 

change .189 

2. The supremacy of Rome passed to the church . . .194 

V 

1. Is a polity an adequate vehicle of the religion? . . . 195 

2. The evolution of the sacerdotal polity affected the church as 

the vehicle and exponent of Christ — 
(a) In doctrine. 
(/3) In ethics. 
(7) In the polities of the religion ... 198-201 

VI 

1. The sacerdotal revolution divorced sacrifice from life . .201 

2. The evolution of the sacerdotal polity depraved the social 

ideal of Christ 202 

I. HOW SECTS HAVE COME OUT OF AN ATTEMPT 

TO REVIVE THE RELIGION OF CHRIST . . 205-241 

I 

THE REFORMATION AS AN ATTEMPT TO RECOVER PRIMITIVE 
CHRISTIANITY 

1. The Reformation in Geneva and in England contrasted . 205 

2. The rise of the Puritans and Separatists in England . . 207 

(i) The Puritans believed in the religious functions of 

the State , . 208 

(ii) The Puritan differed from the Separatist ; the power 

of the civil magistrate in religious matters . . 209 

3. The differences between Puritan and Anglican as regards — 

(a) Polity. 

(j3) Ministry 

(7) Moral integrity of the church . . , , ,211 

II 

1. The idea of the church to the Separatist , • . .212 

2. Apostolic polity and Apostohc religion . , , .214 

Notes — A. Robert Browne and his system . . .216 
B. Brownism as opposed to Puritanism . .217 

3. The Congregational ideal and the Anglican compared — The 

Anglican ideal in Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity . .222 
b 



XVIU CONTENTS 

111 PAGE 

1. Independency : its appeal to the conscience and reason . 227 

2. Its attitude towards the State 228 

3. It denied the lordship of the magistrate over the conscience 

— Toleration a rehgious necessity . . . . .231 

IV 

1. The magistrate not to meddle in matters of conscience, 

because Christ is the King and Law-giver— The attitude 

of the Fathers shared by the founders of Independency . 233 

2. Toleration in England, a creation of Independency — Bacon, 

Chillingworth, Jeremy Taylor, Locke cited in defence of 
Toleration 235 



Part II 

INTRODUCTORY 245-252 

I 

CHRIST IN THE CHURCH AND IN HISTORY 

1. The true attitude towards the N. T. writers . . . 246 

2. Interpretation and criticism of the N. T. — The effort of 

interpretation justified 247 

II 

1. Classes of Criticism : (a) Literary, (j8) Historical, (7) Reli- 

gious, (5) Doctrinal — Distinction of doctrine and dogma . 249 

2. Criticism, as applied to the N. T., brings out religious 

significance of the Book 251 

L WORSHIP 253-282 

I 

THE WORSHIP OF GOD AMONG THE JEWS ; THE EIGHTY- 
FOURTH PSALM 

1. The Psalm interpreted : true in idea of the aged David . 254 

2. The interpretation emphasizes (i) the emotions which 

possess the man, and (ii) the object toward which they 

are directed 256 



CONTENTS 
II 

1. The Temple differs from the Christian church 

2. Religion and Art 

3. The Christian congregation an epitome of mankind 



XIX 



PAGE 
258 

259 

261 



III 

1. The reciprocal action of God and man needful to true 

worship 264 

2. The " living God " of Christian worship .... 264 

3. Man as a worshipping being ...... 266 

4. " Worldliness," as lack of sense of the Eternal Presence, 

which worship gives ... . . . . 268 



IV 

1. Praise and Prayer, as personal and collective 

2. Praise an essential element in worship 

3. Public prayer must be congregational 



270 
271 
273 



1. God's response to human needs . 

2. The place of the sermon in the worship of God 

3. Preaching and its historical place 

4. The influence of the pulpit in Scotch history 

5. The meaning of "minister" 



275 
276 
277 
279 
281 



II. JESUS AND THE FOUNDING OF THE CHURCH 283-305 



I 

1. Jesus Christ: His obscurity and silence .... 283 

2. The distinction between disciples and apostles . . . 285 

3. The ministry of Jesus opens full of buoyancy and hope . 286 

4. The period of Apostolic education and the Jerusalem 

ministry , 287 



XX CONTENTS 

I I PAGB 

1. Why were the disciples of Jesus drawn from the poor and 

unlettered? 288 

2. No priest became a disciple of Jesus ..... 289 

3. The high vocation of the priesthood in the history of Israel 290 

4. Priesthood in the time of Jesus ...... 291 

5. The irreconcilability of priesthood and apostleship . . 291 

III 

1. Contrast between the Sadducees and the Scribes and 

Pharisees ... ..... 293 

2. The Pharisees as interpreters of the Jewish sacred writings 293 

3. Jesus and the Pharisees ; the pubhcans and sinners . . 295 

IV 

1. The sort of men Jesus attracted to Himself . . . 296 

2. He shapes the ideals and purposes of the peasants who / 

followed Him . . . . . ■ . . . 297 v 

3. Types of disciples : account of the Apostles . . . 299 

V 

1. The character of Peter, disciple and apostle . . .301 

2. The John of the Synoptists . 302 

3. The Apostles were filled with an enthusiasm for humanity . 304 

III. THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH . . . 306-321 

I 

1. Jesus in Galilee : Pharisaism 306 

2. The Pharisaic notion of the Law ...... 307 

II 

1. The initial condition of discipleship 308 

2. Jesus and His contemporaries 308 

3. Galilee as the scene of Jesus' early ministry . . . 310 

Hi 

1. Jesus and His relations to the synagogue . . . .312 

2. Jesus honoured by the people, and shuns the scholasticism of 

the Synagogue 314 



CONTENTS 



XXI 



IV 

1. The independent attitude, adopted by Jesus, towards Rab- 

binic tradition ; illustrations . . . 

2. His attitude towards the Sabbath, fasting, etc. 



315 
317 



1. Jesus embodies His teaching in His daily conduct 

2. The ideal of Jesus ...... 

3. The teaching of Jesus, and its success 



318^ 

319 
321 



IV. THE TEACHING OF JESUS IN ITS FIRST 
PERIOD 322-370 

I 



1. The Sermon on the Mount : two versions, Matthew's and 

Luke's .......... 

2. The Sermon on the Mount an answer to the questions that 

Jesus' preaching and presence prompted .... 

3. The Sermon consists of several " sessions " ; these outlined, 

and their questions 

II 

THE FIRST SESSION 

1. The Beatitudes express the ideal of the perfect man , 

2. Jesus does not seek to analyse what happiness is 

3. He seeks to make good States by means of good men 

(1) Interpretaiion of " The Poor in Spiri 
(ii) Of the mourners ... 

(iii) Of the meek .... 
(iv) Of the love of righteousness 
(v) Of the merciful .... 
(vi) Of the pure in heart . 
(vii) Of the peacemakers . 
(viii) Of the persecuted 

4. Beatitudes end with three reasons for consolation addressed 

to the persecuted 

Ill 



322 
324 
325 



326 

327 

328.-^ 

328 

330 

331 

332 

333 

334 

334 

335 



335 



THE SECOND SESSION 

1. The disciples as (i) preservative, and (ii) illuminative . 336-8 

2. Jesus defends Himself from the charge of being a revolu- 

tionary 338 

3. Jesus declares the principle of revolution through evolution 339 



XXll CONTENTS 

IV 
the third session 
The Authority of Jesus 

1. The sovereignty of God supersedes the Law 

2. The righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees . 

3. Those "called great in the Kingdom of Heaven" 

4. (i) Jesus and the Religion of Israel 

(ii) The inwardness of the higher righteousness . 

5. The ethics of Jesus rooted in Theology 



PAGE 

341 
341 
342 
343 
344 
345 
346 



V 
the fourth session— the kingdom 

1. The invisibility of the things God most values 

2. A (i) Philanthropy the creation of Jesus 

(2) Almsgiving among the Jews .... 

(3) The true spirit in almsgiving 
B (i) Almsgiving and prayer as "righteousness" or "wor 

ship of God" 

(2) "Lord, teach us to pray" 

(3) The first part of the Lord's Prayer ; the things of 

God 

(4) The second part of the Lord's Prayer : the distinc 

tion between " sins " and " debts " . 
C (i) Fasting as a religious practice . , . , 
(2) Jesus as the Bridegroom 

VI 
the fifth session— the kingdom 

1. The righteousness of God ; righteousness with Matthew 

and Paul 359 

2. Interpretation of " mammon- worship" .... 361 

3. Autobiographical touches in the words of Jesus . . . 363 

4. The lessons Jesus draws from Nature .... 365 

VII 

SIXTH SESSION — THE KINGDOM AND ITS DUTIES 

1. Jesus answers suppressed or unrecorded questions . . 367 

2. Sympathy which must become conviction : the epilogue . 369 



347 
348 
349 
350 

351 

352 

353 

354 
357 
357 



CONTENTS XXUl 

V. THE TEACHING OF JESUS IN HIS MIDDLE page 
PERIOD— THE IDEA OF THE CHURCH . . 371-431 

I 

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE TEACHING OF JESUS IN 

HIS MIDDLE PERIOD (a) AS REGARDS "MATTER," 

(iS) AS REGARDS "FORM" 

1. The education of the Apostles : Peter's confession . . 373 

2. Confronted with disaster, Jesus sought to found His church 374 

3. The vision of the future church 376 

II 

1. The interpretation of "Thou art Peter" : the term "Peter" 

official, not personal , . 377 

2. Interpretation of " on this ' Petra ' (rock) will I build My 

church" ...... .... 378 

3. Peter as the sort of man the church is to be built of . . 379 

4. Peter and the claims of Rome 380 

III 

1. Christ's idea of the church. 

(i) The only reference to the church universal in the 

teaching of Jesus, 
(ii) Difficulties as to meaning of iKKkiqaia. 
(iii) Agreement sometimes apparent, while differences are 

real, 
(iv) Difficulties may arise from fact that while Jesus spoke 

and taught in Aramaic, the Gospels are written in 

Greek 382 

2. The Hebrew and Greek antecedents of the Biblical term 

"church" 384 

3. The meanings of the term "church" in the New Testament 385 

4. The idea, though not the term, the church starts with 

Christ 387 

IV 

1. The problem of the translation of the term eKKXrjaia . . 389 

2. The English word "church" not a satisfactory rendering of 

€KK\7]cria ...... .... 390 

3. The associations of KvpLaKbv^ from which it is derived, hang 

around the term " church " and its representative in 
cognate tongues 390 



PAGE 



XXIV CONTENTS 

V 

1. Christ as Foundation, Architect, and Builder of the church 392 

2. Its constituent elements : the Saviour and the saved . . 393 

VI 

1. Christ compared with Buddha, Confucius, and Plato . . 393 

2. Christ no dreamer of literary ideals 396 

3. The creative work of Christ, as expressed in the institutions 

of mercy to-day . 397 

4. London as typical of modern life — The good and the bad 

elements in its life — The Christian conscience . . 399 

VII 

1. The method of Jesus in founding His church . . . 400 

2. The personal can alone heal the personal — The Incarnation 401 

VIII 

1. The true meaning of apostolic descent .... 403 

2. Types of the n en moulded by the Spirit of Christ: Ter- 

tullian and Origen, St. Augustine and Pelagius, Dante 
and Thomas a Kempis, Luther and Erasmus . . . 405 

IX 

THE CHURCH INVISIBLE 

1. Christ the Central Force in all historical churches . .410 

2. The magnanimity of Christ 413 

X 

1. Christ is the absolute Sovereign in His own church: a sove- 

reignty not resting on physical force . . . .414 

2. The church ought to be the Incarnation of Christ as regards 

its functions : those of priest, prophet, and king . .415 

XI A 

1. The priesthood of the church is undelegable . . . 416 

2. The ministry must be personal and not official . . .417 

B 

1. The prophetic office of the church 418 

2. The practical and speculative problems to be faced by the 

church 419 

3. The church must deal honestly with thought . . .421 



CONTENTS XXV 

^ PAGE 

1. The church can govern only by submitting to be governed 421 

2. Christ's freedom both internal and external . . . .422 

XII 
I. The coercive forces which have interfered with the church's 

freedom — Monarchy 423 

. 2. The attempts of Labour and Capital to command the 

church 425 

3. The danger to the church from (i) yEstheticism, and (ii) 

Athleticism 426 

XIII 
THE ACTS OF CHRIST'S WHICH ARE ALSO THE CHURCH's 

1. Christ as Head reigns through the church, which is His 

Body 428 

2. The church, as Heir of God, the incarnation of Christ . 429 

3. The church continues the redeeming work of Christ . . 430 

4. The immortal life of the church 431 

5. The church as Judge 431 

VI. THE TEACHING OF JESUS IN ITS THIRD 
PERIOD: THE DEATH 432-468 

I 

1. Differences of teaching in this period 432 

2. Jerusalem, and not Galilee, the scene of the ministry : con- 

trasts 433 

(i) The views of Nature 433 

(ii) Differences between the two places . . . 434 

3. Galilee the home of a mixed race — Judaea the centre of 

Judaism 435 

II 

1. (i) The development of Jesus 437 

(ii) His early environment in Nazareih . . , -437 

2. The questions at issue between Jew and Galilean — 

(i) The Pharisees and the Sadducees, and their different 

spheres of influence 438 

(ii) The Synagogue and the Temple, and their different 

claims 440 



XXVI CONTENTS 

III 

PAGR 

1. In Jerusalem, new opposing forces to be faced by Jesus . 441 

2. The place of " apocalyptic " in the later teaching of Jesus . 442 

3. The character of apocalyptic literature .... 443 

4. (i) The later teaching of Jesus is concerned with the future 

in an unusual degree 445 

(ii) And chiefly with the mystery of His death . . 44") 

THE DEATH OF JESUS 
IV 

1. Calvary a mirror of the eternal strife of God with sin . . 445 

2. The agony of Gethsemane : its meaning .... 446 

3. The attitude of the priests and rulers to Jesus . , . 448 



1. The Passion and Sacrifice of Jesus 449 

2. The ironical conduct of the priests 450 

3. The shame of the Cross transmuted by the grace and love 

of Christ 451 

VI 

1. The Cross as fact and allegory 453 

(i) The Cross as universal 453 

(ii) The Cross is heaviest for the blameless , . . 454 

2. Why did the Holy Son of God suffer ? 

(a) Suffering the instrument of God's love . . . 455 

(jS) The suffering of the innocent is remedial suffering for 

the guilty 456 

(7) Sin gives more pain to the good than to the evil . 456 

3. (i) In the Cross men see sin with a divine eye . . . 456 
(ii) The power of the Cross does not diminish with the 

lapse of time 457 

VII 

1. The two robbers crucified with Jesus 458 

2. The birth of the malefactors and the birth of Jesus , . 459 

3. Their characters as revealed on the Cross .... 461 



CONTENTS XXVll 

VIII 

1. The impenitent hard towards sin 462 

2. The penitent thief 463 

3. The character of Jesus as elucidated by contrast with the 

lives of the two malefactors 465 

IX 

1. The consciousness of Jesus on the Cross . . . , 465 

2. Evil as manifested in the impenitent . . . . ■ . 467 

3. And in the penitent thief 468 

VII. PAUL THE APOSTLE OF JESUS CHRIST . 469-502 

I 

1. "Accidental" and "essential" differences of character . 469 

2. The qualities, called " accidental," which distinguish Paul 

alike from Jesus and apostles 470 

3. The "essential" qualities which belong to Jesus as dis- 

tinguished from Paul and the older apostles . . .471 

II 

1. The call of Paul 474 

2. The continuity of his spiritual development . . -475 

3. The part played by (i) descent and (ii) environment in the 

education of Paul 476 

4. The composite character of the people of Tarsus . . 477 

III 

1. Characteristics of the thought and speech of Paul : contrast 

with the speech of Jesus 478 

2. The Jew and the Greek in Tarsus 481 

3. The Jew and the complex culture of the Roman world . 482 

4. Paul on the eve of starting for Jerusalem to study the law . 483 



IV 

1. The disillusionment of Paul in Jerusalem 

2. The death and resurrection of Jesus and the Jews 

3. Paul and Gamaliel 

4. Paul's persecution of the Christians 

5. His conversion on the way to Damascus 



484 
485 
486 
487 
488 



XXVlll CONTENTS 



1. The lesson of the retreat into Arabia 489 

2. Paul and the apostles in Jerusalem ..... 490 

3. What Paul learned on his return to Tarsus .... 492 

4. The discovery of Paul by Barnabas 494 

VI 

1. Jew and Greek join in making an apostle .... 495 

2. Paul turns to the Gentiles. 

(i) Christianity emerges from Judaism .... 496 

(ii) The philanthropy of the early church . . . 497 

(iii) The missionary journey of Paul and Barnabas . 497 

(iv) The question of circumcision in the church . . 498 

3. The law of caste violated by a common meal . . . 499 

4. The distinctive Pauline doctrine enunciated in the Epistle 

to the Galatians : man is not justified by law, but by faith 500 

VIII. PAUL IN EUROPE ...... 503-544 

I 

1. The separation of Barnabas from Paul .... 503 

2. The characters of Paul and Barnabas as manifested in 

this crisis .......... 504 

3. Paul's mission to Europe — The supreme event in history . 506 

4. An "external" view of Paul and his mission . . . 506 

II 

1. The joint mission of Paul and Silas 507 

2. Their missionary journey ....... 508 

3. The religious associations of Asia Minor .... 509 

4. The call of the civilized world to the Christian apostle . 510 

III 

1. The monotheism of Israel, as modified by Christianity . 512 

2. Paul was, though a convert from Judaism, yet not an apostate 513 

3. The Jewish hatred that followed Paul 514 

IV 

1. The characteristics of the author of the Acts . . .516 

2. His attitude towards the Jews of Asia 518 



CONTENTS • XXIX 

V PAGE 

1. Paul and Barnabas at Lystra ...... 519 

2. Paul's journeys in Asia Minor . . . ... . 520 

(Note on the Epistle to the Galatians, 521-524) 

VI 

1. The attitude of Paul towards the Gentiles ; and the moral 

superiority of the Jew to the Greek . . . . 525 

2. The significance of the Greek to the Jew .... 527 

3. Paul in Europe : his speech at Athens .... 529 

VII 

1. Paul in Corinth — Gallio's attitude to religion , . . 533 

2. The writings and writers of the N.T. ..... 535 

3. The Pauline letters, and their characteristics . . . 536 

VIII 

1. The value of the Pauline epistles ...... 537 

2. Paul makes Christianity literary . . . . . 538 

3. His characteristics as revealed in his epistles ; their place in 

the N.T. canon 539 

4. The emotional quality of the epistles . . . . . 541 

5. The epistles discuss particular facts in the light of general 

principles — The influence of Athens on Paul . . . 542 

JX. PAUL IN ASIA AND IN PRISON , . 545-576 

I 

1. Paul's later missionary journeys. Apollos in Ephesus and 

Corinth 545 

2. The growth of Paul's mind 546 

(Note on the contents of i Corinthians, 547-551) 

II 

1. Exorcism in Ephesus 552 

2. The rehgion Paul encountered in Ephesus . . • ' • 553 

3. Paul's arraignment in the theatre at Ephesus . . -554 

III 

1. The 2nd Epistle to the Corinthians : its contents . -556 

2. The date and contents of the Epistle to the Romans . -557 



XXX CONTENTS 

IV 



PAGE 



I & 2. The contents of the Epistle to the Romans, chaps, i-viii . 559 

V 

1. The contents of Romans : God's action in history, chaps. 

ix-xi 564 

2. Romans, chaps, xii-xv. Ethical section of the Epistle . . 565 

VI 

1. Did Gallio read Romans ? 566 

2. Paul's egotism of vocation ....... 569 

VII 

1. Paul's return to Jerusalem 570 

2. Paul's meeting with James at Jerusalem . . . .572 

3. Paul's conflict with the Jewish spirit at Jerusalem. The 

epistles written during his imprisonment. The end . 575 



X. JOHN THE APOSTLE ...... 577-591 

I 

1. John and Paul . . 577 

2. Paul's self-revelation in his letters . , , . , 578 

3. John in his epistles and gospel ...... 579 

II 

1. John and Peter 579 

2. The religious experience of John 580 

III 

1. John as friend and interpreter of Jesus .... 581 

2. What the friendship of John meant to Jesus . . . 582 

3. The theology of John, and his interpretation of Jesus . , 583 

IV 

J. The characteristics of Jesus in John's gospel . . . 585 
2. John's mystical theology, and its influence on Christian , 

thought 587 



CONTENTS XXXI 

V 

PAGE 

1. Symbolism in the Fourth Gospel 588 

2. The connection of the Gospel and the Apocalypse . . 589 

3. John's apocalyptic vision of the church .... 590 

XI. JOHN THE APOSTLE 592-609 

I 

1. The relation of the prologue to the history in the Fourth 

Gospel 592 

2. The prologue of John and the genealogies of Matthew and 

Luke 593 

3. The birth-stories of Matthew and Luke .... 594 

4. John's view of Christ 594 

II 

I & 2. The value of the Logos-doctrine for John's conception of 

God and Christ 596 

III 

IDEAS IN THE PROLOGUE 

1. The true knowledge of God 598 

2. Sonship and Fatherhood 600 

3. Christ, the visible manifestation of the Father . . . 601 

IV 

I & 2. Jesus comforts His disciples 602-605 

3. Belief not easy for them in view of His coming death . 605 

V 

1. The sensuous scepticism of Thomas 606 

2. Philip's question, as the question of collective man . . 608 

XIL JOHN THE APOSTLE 610-628 

I 

1. Man's need of God . 610 

2. The autobiography of Mill 611 

3. His religious beliefs 612 



XXXll CONTENTS 



II 



PAGE 

1. God must represent man's highest idea .... 613 

2. Thought not a product of organized brain . . . .614 

3. Neither in man, nor in an ape 615 

4. A restatement of the test case : " Mind the Father of all 

things" . 615 

III 

1. The moral consciousness of man, a witness to God . . 617 

2. God must be absolutely holy . . . . , .618 

3. The witness of the heart : God is love 619 

IV 

1. Revelation, the response of God to the need of man . ,621 

2. Jesus Christ as the personal revelation of God to man — 

God as Sovereign and Father 623 

V 

1. Sovereignty and Fatherhood 625 

2. Their unity in the Christian conception of God , . . 626 

3. The Christian doctrine of salvation 627 

Index • . 629 



STUDIES 
IN RELIGION AND THEOLOGY 

THE CHURCH : 
IN IDEA AND IN HISTORY 



05t6s ^arlu 6 irpocp'ffT'rj^, 'Irjaovs 6 dirb "Na^ap^d ttjs ToKiXalas. — Matthew xxi. II, 

OVK ^crri 7rpo(pr]TT]s drLjULOs, el fir] if ttj TrarpidL avTov. — Mark vi. 4. 

iyivero avrjp Trpo(prjTr]s dvvarbs ev 'ipyi^ koX Xoycp evavriov rod deou /cat rravrbs tov 
\aov. — Luke xxi v. 19. 

6's ye TOV idiov vloD ovk e0etcraro, dW virep tj/jlQv Trdvrwv wapedojKei/ avrbv, ttcDs 
ovxl Kal (T^v avTip tcl irdvTa rifjuv %apt<rerat. — Romans viii. 32. 

'^vdevbe Kal ddeoi KeKXrjfieda. Kal OjULoXoyou/jiev tQiv tolovtojv vofit^o/x^voju deCbv 
ddeoL elvai, dXX' ovxl tov dXrjdecrTdrov Kal irarpos diKaLO(ruvT]s Kal awcppocrvvrjs Kal 
T^v dXXwv dperOiv, dveiriixlKTOv re KaKias deov. — ^Justin Martyr, Apologia, i, 6. 

"Oaa odv irapd irdcri KaXds el'prjTaL, rifxQv tGiv xP'-<^TLavvui eart' rbv yap dirb 
dyevv-qrov Kal dpprjTov deov Xbyov /xerd rbv debv irpocrKwohixev- Kal dyairQfiev, eireLdr) 
Kal 81 7]fxds dvOpwiros yiyovev, ottojs Kal tmv iradC^v tG)v rjfJieTipwv (rv/Mfx^Toxos yevopie- 
vos Kal iacTLv Troirjcrrirat.. — Apologia, ii, 13. 

'OpObs \6yos TrapeXdiby op irdcras 56^as ov8^ irdvra dbyfiara KoXd dirodelKvvcLVy 
dXXd rd ixkv (pavXa, rd 5^ dyadd. — Apologia, ii, 9. 

Quo vos, benedicti, de carcere in custodiarium, si forte, translates existimetis. 
Habet tenebras, sed lumen estis ipsi. Habet vincula, sed vos soluti deo estis. 
Triste illic expirat, sed vos odor estis suavitatis. Index expectatur, sed vos 
estis de judicibus ipsis indicaturi. Contristetur illi qui fructum sseculi suspirat. 
Christianus etiam extra carcerem sseculo renuntiavit, in carcere autem etiam 
carceri. Nihil interest, ubi sitis in sseculo, qui extra saeculum estis. — Tertullian, 
Ad Marty ras, cap. ii. 

Reason is natural revelation, whereby the Eternal Father of light and fountain 
of all knowledge communicates to mankind that portion of truth which he has 
laid within the reach of their natural faculties : revelation is fiatural reason 
enlarged by a new set of discoveries communicated by God immediately. — Locke, 
Essay on Human Understanding, chap, xix, 4. 

Falsa religio dicitur superstitio ; quia facit ut homines non contenti diuinis 
institutis, super ilia veluti stare et assurgere conentur, tanquam ipso Deo sapien- 
tiores. — Alstedii, Theologia Catechetica, sect. I, cap. i. 

I do not hesitate to affirm that our religion has been indebted to the attempts^ 
though not the intentions, of its bitterest enemies. They have tried its 
strength, indeed, and, by trying, they have displayed its strength ; and that 
in so clear a light, as we could never have hoped, without such a trial, to 
have viewed it. Let them, therefore, write ; let them argue, and when argu- 
ments fail, even let them cavil against religion as much as they please ; I should 
be heartily sorry that ever in this island, the asylum of liberty, where the spirit 
of Christianity is better understood — however defective the inhabitants are in the 
observance of its precepts — than in any other part of the Christian world ; I 
should, I say, be sorry that in this island so great a disservice were done to 
religion as to check its adversaries in any other way than by returning a candid 
answer to their objections. — Principal George Campbell's Dissertation oft 
Miracles in reply to Hume, 

Facimus nos cum iis, qui duas ponunt Notas, unam velut a priori et ante- 
cedentem, doctrinse scil. fundamentalis puritatem, alteram a posteriori et con- 
sesquentem, vigtse sanctitatem decentem, amore in Deum et fratres demonstratam. 

Marckii, Compendium Theologia^ cap. xxxii. 

B 



ETirev atr ois b'lTjarovs, "'A/^V ^l^^f \4y(a i/uv, vplv 'Aj8paA/t yeviadai, iyd) 
elfii." — John viii. 58. 

'dirpeirev apxi-^peiis, 6(nos, &KaKos, A/xlavroSf Kexwpfo'At^i'os, &irb tG>v SLfxapruXQUf 
Kal ixj/iiKbrepoi tCov oipavCov yevd/ievos. — Hebrews vii. 26. 

De nobis scilicet Diogenis dictum est : Megarenses obsonant quasi orastina 
die morituri, sedificant vero quasi numquam morituri. Sed stipulam quis in 
alieno oculo facilius perspicit quam in suo trabem. — Tertullian, Apology^ cap. 
xxxix. 

Hie est Dei cultus, hgec vera religio, hsec recta pietas, hsec tantum Deo debita 
servitus. Quaecumque igitur immortalis potestas quantalibet virtute prgedita, si 
nos diligit sicut se ipsam, ei vult esse subditos, ut beati simus ; cui et ipsa subdita 
beata est. Si ergo non colit Deum, misera est, quia Deo privatur ; si autem 
colit Deum, non vult se coli pro Deo. Illi enim potius divinse sententise sufFra- 
gatur, et dilectionis viribus favet, qua scriptum est : Sacrificans diis eradicabitur^ 
nisi Domino soli. — Augustine, De Civitate Dei, lib. 10, cap. iii. 

Es ist eine eigenthiimliche Vollkommenheit der Entwicklung der Person- 
lichkeit des Erlosers, dass sie sich in der Einheit mit dem Ganzen des mensch- 
lichen Geschlechts entwickelt hat. — Rothe, Stille Stunden, p. 152. 

Das Christenthum ist uns noch immer viel zu sehr blosse Religion, wahrend 
es doch in der That ein ganzes neues menschliches Leben ist. Der Erloser war 
ganzer Mensch. — Ibid., p. 153. 

Hat est jemals einen schlechthin originalen Menschen gegeben, so ist es Jesus 
gewesen. — Ibid ,^. 153. 

Dass einem Christus gross ist und dass er einem ein grosser Herr ist, das 
sind zwei himmelweit verschiedene Dinge. — Ibid., p. 157. 

Der Glaube ist beides, das Personlichste und zugleich auch das Individuellste 
im Menschen. — Ibid., p. 171. 

To this purpose it pleaseth the Father of spirits, of old, to constrain' the 
emperor of Rome, Antoninus Pius, to write to all the governors of his provinces 
to forbear to persecute the Christians ; because such dealing must needs be so 
far from converting the Christians from their way, that it rather begat in their 
minds an opinion of their cruelties. — Roger Williams, Bloudy Tenent of Perse- 
cution ^ p. no. 

God never loves to plant his Church by blood. 
Conscience ought not to be violated or forced. 

Ibid., p. 152. 

King James said to the fly. Have I three kingdoms, and thou must needs fly 
into my eye ? Is there not enough to meddle withal upon the stage, or in love, 
or at the table, but religion ? 

Religion is like the fashion; one man wears his doublet slashed, another 
laced, another plain ; but every man has a doublet ; so every man has his 
religion. We differ about the trimming.— Selden, Table Talk^ cxxi. 



I 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION IN THE 
FIRST CENTURY* 

I 

I. ^ I ^HE Church is the body of Christ; and the churches 
X into which the Church is not divided, but distrib- 
uted, ought to be, as it were, incarnations of His Spirit, or- 
gans by which His beneficent activity is maintained and 
exercised on earth. So far as they have been this they have 
existed by Divine right, and been confessed by Christ before 
His Father who is in heaven and before His holy angels .f 
The multitude of churches or sects as they are named by 
sectarian ecclesiastics, is a witness to His inexhaustible sig- 
nificance, to the variety of the ways in which He may be 
apprehended and to the modes in which He can work. 
The evils of division which good men have mourned, and 
always will mourn, spring from the bitterness with which 
men resent difference from themselves or their loved insti- 
tutions, not from the living relations of men or churches 
to Christ. If He were only as the Greek, or the Latin, 
or the Anglican Church conceived Him, He would not be 
the marvellous problem, and, as a consequence, could not 
be the marvellous power, He is. It is the wonder of men 
in the presence of Christ that has created the churches; 
they are so immense a multitude because He has been 
so creative a personality. A grand historic Church may 

* Address from chair of Congregational Union in the May of 1883. 
t Matt. X, 32 ; Luke xii. 8. 



4 A FREE CHURCH MAY BE NATIONAL, 

speak of skilled and devoted statesmanship; the mul- 
titudinous sects speak of the enthusiasm of a great re- 
generative love. 

2. Whether the political or spiritual ideal of the Church 
be the truer and more excellent, might be a fitting enough 
subject of discussion from this chair. For one thing, it 
would be strictly relevant to our times, and might be made 
vindicative of our right as Congregational churches to be, 
especially as we exist by the truth and through the Spirit 
of Christ for the salvation of man ; for we are churches de- 
voted, almost by pre-eminence, to the realization of religion 
in the whole life of man, and, in particular, in all the insti- 
tutions of the nation we proudly call Great Britain. Though 
Free Churches, we are yet churches consecrated to the crea- 
tion of national religion, though it is a religion which loves 
to see the collective people doing justly, loving mercy, and 
walking humbly* before God. We distinguish between a 
National and an Established Church; for the one we feel 
the utmost reverence, but the other we do not even respect. 
For it is a small thing to us that a State endow a Church ; 
but it is a great thing to us that the people who compose 
the State be penetrated by righteousness and inspired by 
truth. God will allow Himself to be honoured in no way 
but by an honourable and obedient life ; and the church that 
has failed to make a nation believing, reverent, and dutiful 
to God may be an Established Church, without being in 
any real or even in a tolerable sense national. 

We are not indifferent, then, to the stateUness of the 
political ideal, especially as incorporated in an ancient and 
historical Church. We may be but prosaic Philistines, yet 
we are not so utterly void of imagination as to feel no rever- 
ence for an institution which testifies to the continuous 

* Micah vi. 8. 



BUT CANNOT BE ESTABLISHED " 5 

speech and presence of God with man, which awes by its 
past, its monuments, its comely and impressive worship; 
while it wins us by the many sweet yet ardent spirits among 
its living sons, and by the treasured memories of the saintly 
men who have loved it and lived for it. But, while we do 
not despise the political ideal, we love one that is simpler and 
more sublime, because it brings ''the glory that excelleth "* 
into the common and indistinguished life of man. The 
supreme thing to us is the man's relation to Christ; where 
that is what it ought to be, all is well. The highest dignities 
are his ; of these he is made largely yet modestly conscious, 
and becomes too reverent of himself to be a mean, or base, 
or unreal man any more. He is a king and priest unto 
God, a son of the everlasting Father, feeling his meanest 
moments transfigured by the light of the Eternal, the 
dustiest levels of his life watered by the stream that flowed 
''fast by the oracle of God."t Our ambition is to make 
men citizens of God's Kingdom, consciously loyal to no 
church but the Church, invisible and eternal, of Jcvsus 
Christ. 

3. But I feel that there are fitter questions for this chair 
than even the questions as to our most distinctive church 
polities. Every question in polity reposes on a prior and 
more radical question in religion. The ultimate grounds, 
I will not say of our Nonconformity, but of our existence as 
Free Churches of Jesus Christ, are theological and religious, 
not political. Our reasons for dissenting from the Church 
of England are too fundamental to be merely or mainly 
ecclesiastical. We dissent because we believe that she fails 
adequately to interpret and realize for the people of Eng- 
land the religion of Christ. Where the matter is so radical, 
it is better to turn from the more occasional to the deeper 

* 2 Cor. iii. 10. f Pa-radise Lost, bk. i, 1. 12. 



6 CHRISTIAN RELIGION AND CHRISTIAN CHURCHES. 

and more permanent issues. I would it were possible for 
the Christian people of England to forget for one splendid 
hour their ancient feuds ; and to look to their ecclesiastical 
rivalries and controversies from, what may be termed, the 
standpoint of the Redeemer, and man's simple and direct re- 
lation to Him. He loves to be loved of men ; the love of 
the obscurest and least ideal He holds most dear. Whene it 
is real He would not forbid its expression, but would rather 
say, ''Let the love work in its own way, and it will do well." 
He may have pleasure in the stateliest worship, but not 
so far as it is stately, only so far as it is the worship of love. 
He may have pleasure in the meanest worship, but not so 
far as it is mean, only so far as it is dignified by being wor- 
ship in spirit and in truth. Were the churches able to look 
at each other from this standpoint, they would be able to 
see unity where now they feel only diversity ; and would lose 
the ignorance which breeds contempt in the knowledge 
that begets respect and discovers brotherhood. Where 
controversy had reigned, emulation would live; the ambi- 
tion to excel in the ministries of gentleness and peace 
would supersede the ambition to excel in authority, or to 
conquer in argument. Were the Church of Rome suddenly, 
yet deeply, moved by a true and tender affection for all 
sects or societies that truly love the Lord Jesus, would 
she not blush to own her past, hasten to abjure the in- 
fallibility which had consecrated its crimes; and by an 
act of noblest atonement, in which her old nature was lost 
and a new nature won, reconcile divided Christendom, and 
inspire it with new life and victorious energy ? Were 
the Anglican Church to stand up before the English people 
penetrated with the conviction that love was the supreme 
thing, that to have it was to have all things, would she not 
confess that she had failed to be Christ's as Christ is God's ; 



CHURCHES BOUND BY LAW OF LOVE 7 

and would she not look back with real and lively regret on 
the childish period when she prided herself on her orders, 
believed in her apostolic succession, and thought her con- 
nection with the State needed to secure the continued being 
and authority of religion in England ? And would she not 
humbly ask the poorest body that loved the Lord, to let 
her love it ? Were the Free Churches seized at the same 
moment by the like Divine passion, would not the spirit 
of jealousy die, the voice of mutual criticism and unchari- 
table judgment be hushed, and all their regenerative 
forces concentrated and organized into an irresistible army ? 
Were anything like this to happen, men would indeed find 
that the Kingdom of God had come; and that Christian 
societies were the realized religion of Christ. And were 
they to realize it, its victory would be achieved. That 
victory tarries, not because the enemy is strong, but be- 
cause the forces of Christendom are weak; and they are 
weak simply because they lack the love that unifies and 
compels to common and loyalest service. Where division 
from us is judged and treated as separation from Christ, 
there the very power truly to love man is lost; and with 
it goes the power to work as agencies reconciling men to 
God. He who hates a fellow-Christian can neither love a 
brother-man, nor make him feel loved of God. 



II 

I. Let us attempt, then, to look at the Christian religion 
dissociated from the sects and sectarianisms of to-day. The 
only moment when it can be so seen is the ideal period of its 
history; in that period it issued fresh and beautiful from 
the mind of Christ, and began in the hands of His apostles 
its glorious battle against evil and sin, and for God and 



8 THE FIRST CENTURY AN ETERNAL NOW. 

humanity. That moment Hes far behind, yet it does not 
retreat from us, rather the distance lessens as time grows. 
The first and nineteenth centuries stand more fairly and 
clearly face to face than the nineteenth and tenth, or than 
the tenth and the first. The first is, indeed, in the history 
of man, the pre-eminent century, the nearest thing to the 
''Eternal Now" which time can know. All the centuries 
before it yearned towards it, all the centuries after it have 
felt its presence; its events lie behind, but its spirit goes 
before. It has scored itself so deeply into the mind of man 
that he cannot forget or feel remote from it; nay, it had 
to wait till it had created the very faculty of knowledge 
before it could be known. And the better it is known, the 
nearer it seems, the more living, creative, authoritative it 
becomes. 

Let us think, then, what a work was done between the 
years 30 and 90 of our era, only sixty years in all ! Jesus 
had spoken His words, created His society, died His death 
— made Himself, in His three years' ministry, the wonder 
and the salvation of man. He had called men to be His 
apostles, had endowed them with the Spirit, and the tongues 
of fire ; and they had gone forth preaching His word, found- 
ing churches, saving men, making through and for the men 
saved a literature that was to be the most sacred litera- 
ture of civilized man, and of man it civilized. When those 
sixty years ended, all seemed, at Babylon, and Alexandria, 
and Athens, and Rome, as it had been when they began. 
But all was changed — man to the world, and the world 
to man. Another notion of God, another idea of religion, 
another ideal of humanity had come to reign over his spirit ; 
a vaster immensity had opened round his soul, a mightier 
eternity appealed to his imagination and kindled his hope. 
The change penetrated everywhere : it was to affect political 



WHAT IT SAW CREATED 9 

institutions, making them freer and humaner; it was to 
recreate literature, supplying philosophy with sublimer 
subjects of speculation, poetry with grander themes, history 
with its most wonderful pages and at once most irresistible 
and insoluble problem, and devotion with its loftiest in- 
spiration. Art was to feel the new spirit, and rise from the 
rudest beginnings in dark catacombs to its most splendid 
achievements; Architecture was to build temples to the 
honour of Christ's name ; Painting, through its love of Him, 
was to idealize the manhood, the womanhood, and the in- 
fancy of earth, that they might become symbols of the hu- 
manities that live in God; Music, exalted and transformed 
by His influence, if not changing her very nature, yet be- 
coming a new art that she might the better sing the praise of 
His passion, and the more fitly render the exultation of His 
victory. The supreme moments in the later centuries have 
been the moments when the first has been mightiest ; when 
the Christ has, as it were, entered anew the spirit of man 
— inspired it with a deeper hate of tyranny, falsehood, 
sin and wrong, and a more victorious love of freedom, truth, 
and righteousness. The centuries and peoples that love 
these most know Christ best ; the more of these there is in 
an age, the nearer the age stands to Him. It is His grow- 
ing mastery over the human spirit that makes our day 
struggle so strenuously to stand in the presence of Deity. 
Man feels that if he had once pierced and possessed the 
mystery of Christ, his last problem would be solved, his 
deepest need be satisfied. 

2. Now, if we are to understand the work of those sixty 
years — what Christianity was in the century of its birth 
and what it then achieved — we must look at it from within ; 
see it as it came to its own age, rather than as it has come 
to ours. The meaning of the early missions has been re- 



lO MISSIONS IN THE FIRST CENTURY. 

vealed to us as it was not to the early missionaries ; for it 
did not stand so clear before the eyes of the apostles as it 
does before ours. Theirs was a stiller, simpler, smaller 
world than the one we know. "All nations," speaks more 
of collective mankind, which is an immenser and more 
oppressive thought now than then. We know, as they 
did not, how religions possess people — have roots that so 
clasp rock and soil that they can be lifted only, as it were, 
by lifting the solid earth out of its place. To "make dis- 
ciples of all nations"* was a task so stupendous that it 
was hidden by its very magnitude. Man had to wait till 
time and history had lifted him to a position high enough 
to overlook humanity before he could even guess its size. 
It needed the interpretation of Providence to show what 
the apostolic work meant and achieved. The men who 
did it were denied the interpretation, but only that they 
might the better do the work. It was lucky, indeed, 
that they could not see, as we do, the measure or the issues 
of their mission; if they had, perhaps its very vastness 
would have paralyzed their energies; but they knew the 
inspiration of the love of Him who sent them. Strong 
in it, they went forth, assured of His presence to do their 
work; and they so did it as to make their century the 
pre-eminent century of time, the mother of all that was 
holy and true, free and good, in the centuries it carried in 
its bosom. 

3. When these sixty years opened, what was there of 
Christianity? All that was of it lived in the person of 
Jesus, silent, undiscovered, unsuspected. Now, consider 
what this means! To understand it. He must be seen, 
not through the faith and history of the centuries which 
followed ; but as He came to His work, before outer action 

* Matt, xxviii. 19. 



JESUS CHRIST ITS GREAT CREATION II 

had made His inner meaning manifest. He rises before 
us a Syrian peasant, poor, obscure, unlettered, in the 
mean home and sordid surroundings which have in the 
East proved so fatal to the higher manhood. The common 
life of man is His, though He may have lived it in beautiful 
blamelessness. Suddenly He breaks years of golden silence 
by a brief year or two of golden speech. Poor men hear 
Him, love Him, follow Him; lettered scribes study Him, 
attempt to puzzle Him, get puzzled, disapprove of Him, 
and do their best to discredit Him with the people ; astute 
and venerable priests dislike Him, fear lest His action 
should become injurious to their order and their interests, 
and so they plot His death. In the irony or the wisdom 
of Providence the obscurity in His coming was eclipsed by 
the infamy in which He died. 

This is outer history, all that the eyes of a Pilate, or 
even a Tacitus, saw; but was it all that could be seen? 
*'No," say some, ''there were His wonderful works; what 
men of later days were to call miracles, finding them a 
burden or a support to faith, just as the idea of nature or of 
Christ was the greater." The argument was first put by 
Nicodemus when he said: ''Rabbi, we know that Thou 
art a teacher come from God : for no man could do those 
signs which Thou doest, except God were with him."* 
Well, the miracles need not concern us; His supreme 
works were not physical, but spiritual; undiscernible by 
sense, but only the more marvellous to thought. His 
words were few, but they were so wondrous that they 
shame into silence all the wisest words of the wisest men, 
and steal over the earth as if the voice of the Eternal had 
broken into softest speech. His words, indeed, come to 
comfort sorrow; to work contrition; to fill persons with 

* John iii. 2. 



12 HE RE-MADE GOD AND MAN. 

unspeakable love to God and tenderness to man; to give 
to peoples a law they ought to obey. His ideals they most 
revere when they are most civilized, even while confessing 
that they are the hardest, because the highest, ideals that 
have ever come to man. His character was so exalted, 
so perfect, so holy ; reposed on a faith in God so absolute, 
incorporated an ideal of man so universal and transcen- 
dent, that it has lifted the conception of manhood through- 
out the world ; and made men feel its dignity, beauty, its 
splendid possibilities ; and forced men to see how humanity 
stood so allied to Deity that they could be wedded with- 
out man ceasing to be human, or Deity Divine. His mis- 
sion, as He conceived it, was of all missions the strangest, 
yet the most sublime — to found a kingdom of saved men, 
renewed spirits, obedient to God, dutiful to man, living as 
citizens of earth, while possessed and owned of Eternity. 
His idea of His own person and place was such as had never 
before entered into the mind of man; measured by the 
common standard, it was altogether audacious; judged 
by Himself, it was but seemly and becoming — He was 
Son of Man, no man's son, God's Son ; He who alone knows 
the Father, the only medium through whom the Father 
could be known; able to save, able to punish, by His life 
enlightening, by His death redeeming, the world. When 
we listen to Jesus as He appears and lives in history, we 
feel in a world of paradox, so mean are His conditions, so 
grand His person and His speech. When we turn to the 
history which interprets Him, we feel in a world of mightier 
wonders and vaster problems. His loftiest claims are 
more than justified; the mean arena on which He lived 
becomes but the fixed point from which He was to move 
the world ; His ministry of a transient moment has been 
proved to be a ministry of the Eternal. What name is 



man's societies and his church 13 

like to His ? What honour can be compared to the honour 
He has received ? The men who bear His name are ex- 
pected to be the most blameless and beneficent of men. 
The societies that exist for His purposes and through His 
truth are the mightiest religious societies, and possess the 
mightiest religion in the world. His person has been 
so construed that it bears to faith the form of God; His 
name so praised that it stands above every name. His 
moment of deepest shame has become His moment of 
highest glory; the death He died is a sacrifice He offered 
through the Eternal Spirit on account of the sin and for 
the salvation of man. These are not mere wonders of 
dreamland; they are sober matters of history, and in- 
dubitable realities of human experience. Where and 
while the memory of His death was most vivid these things 
were preached concerning Him. That death was hardly 
twenty years old when the most wonderful of the treatises 
which explain its meaning were written. In twenty years 
more societies that loved and worshipped Him, and lived 
by faith in His name, were to be found in every city of 
the Roman Empire. Providence had spoken ; man might 
doubt, deny, resist, but the decree was fixed and irrevo- 
cable. By this Christ — springing out of His very being, 
as it were, the spontaneous yet purposed and necessary 
creation of His person — a new religion had come, mani- 
festly destined of God to be the universal religion of man. 



Ill 

I. Here, then, is our starting-point: Christ creates 
Christianity, His is its being ; everything material or essen- 
tial in it runs back into Him. Men may say, ''The religion 
owes less to Jesus than to Paul; he made its high and 



14 WHAT PAUL DID FOR THE RELIGION. 

spiritual universalism." But Paul made no part of the 
matter, made only the form in which it could best be stated, 
the terms in which it could most fitly be explained. The 
theology of Paul was a science of Christ, and without the 
Christ no science of Him had been possible. This is a matter 
we must understand ; it is a luminous point Hghting up what 
were otherwise densest darkness, making manifest the rela- 
tion between the creative Person and the created religion. 
Note '' the man" Paul, a Jew, with the blood of his race hot 
and strong in him ; cradled in Judaism, learned in it, zeal- 
ous for it, ready to live, to die, to love, to hate for it ; with pity 
enough for the unfortunate Gentile, and with no pity for the 
apostate Jew. His teachers, the men he most revered, who 
had done the most to form and furnish his mind, were the 
men who had most controverted and condemned the words 
of Jesus. The priests, the men whose office was the most 
sacred and honoured in his ancestral religion, were the men 
who had, for the good and safety of the people, demanded 
that Jesus should be crucified. One who had so merited the 
hate of Judaism, was not one Paul could easily learn to love ; 
nay, to confront with open face the mere historical truth, to 
conceive Jesus as in any sense or degree true, must have 
been, to a man so constituted, fashioned, situated, a matter 
of transcendent difficulty. Yet, this initial difficulty sur- 
mounted, what is the result? This man of royal spirit and 
eagle vision — in speculative genius, in dialectic, in mass 
and passion of moral nature, among the foremost men of his 
day — builds, within twenty years of the crucifixion, an im- 
mense and finely articulated system which has the Divine 
Sonship of Jesus as its basis, and the reconciliation of all 
things in Him to God as its apex. Could you calculate the 
force needed to effect, not only the revolution, but the con- 
structive achievement ? Think of the man's race, of the 



KNOWLEDGE IMPOSSIBLE WITHOUT FAITH 1 5 

passion with which he loved its history, schools, faith, 
worship ; of his enthusiasm for the honour, the unity, the 
sole sovereignty of God ; yet the knowledge of Jesus works 
so mighty a change in this man as to make him, even while 
sitting in the shadow of the cross, ascribe to Him divine 
names and dignities; to conceive Him as ''the Lord from 
heaven," ''the Lord of glory," "the Son of God," "who 
saves by His grace " and reigns over all. The thing is won- 
derful, has no parallel anywhere. There have been great 
religious teachers ; founders, too, of great religions, but no 
one has ever, by the very generation that knew and handled 
him, been honoured Hke our Christ; been all at once, to its 
faith and reason alike, a centre round which a new world 
crystallized — a world which explained yet repealed, ful- 
filled yet abolished the old. In a moment, at His touch, as 
it were, a new system of the universe rose, founded on Him. 
God was changed, invested with a richer nature, a more 
manifold unity, a fatherliness that made His sovereignty 
as gracious as it was supreme. Man was changed, took a 
vaster meaning, stood in all his centuries and in all his units 
a mighty organism, built round the Christ. The inheri- 
tance from the past, the outlook as regards the future, the 
duties to the present, the possibilities of evil, the capabilities 
of good — all were changed, at once and for ever, by this 
contact of Jesus with the thought and the spirit of man. It 
was not simply the words He spoke, the works He did, the 
death He died; it was Himself; He changed everything, 
became the new object of faith that made the whole world 
of faith new. But what does this mean? Does it not 
mean that the person created the religion? that the being 
of Christ was the birth of Christianity? His appearance 
was its becoming: by Him alone it lived and lives. 

2. The religion, then, thus created and instituted, spring- 



1 6 THE PERSON OF THE FOUNDER MAKES THE 

ing from its living root in the Person of its Founder, begins 
to be, and begins to be as a religion at once missionary and 
universal. It is intended to embrace "all nations," to be 
preached to all men everywhere. Now, mark, this is an 
aboriginal and essential characteristic of the religion. Paul 
did not create this universalism ; Jesus did. It was because 
Jesus had done it that Paul so victoriously vindicated alike 
his gospel and his mission. But a religion at once universal, 
aggressive, and exclusive, claiming the faith of all men, 
allowing no other faith to stand by its side, was an un- 
heard-of thing, a creation of an absolutely new order. 
Religions, especially in Western Asia and Europe, had 
hitherto been national ; the gods of a land were its people's 
— respected, perhaps, by other nations, but only as a 
means of showing respect to the nations whose gods they 
were. When Rome became a universal empire she thought 
that she ought to be universal in her religious interests 
and regards; and so she built her Pantheon, and made 
welcome to it the deities of her multitudinous subject- 
peoples. That was encyclopaedic, but not universal; to 
recognize all gods as true is the precise opposite of the 
worship of the only true God. In the far East, indeed, an 
immense missionary religion was already four centuries old. 
Buddhist preachers had spread throughout India, were 
penetrating the farther East, and, perhaps, seeking a way 
into the sated and sceptical and superstitious West. But 
Buddhism was no genuine universalism ; it could associate 
with other faiths, could accept a divided homage, and 
where alone, it was too fatal to the social sanity of man 
to be capable of life in lands where the social ideal was 
plastic and sovereign. But the religion of Jesus was, as it 
were, a born universalism; to be such was its native and 
inalienable characteristic. It was ideal, spiritual, encum- 



religion: the functions of the apostles 17 

bered by no polity, burdened by no ritual, organized into 
no system, but absolutely a religion of spirit and truth. 

3. Now this, its intrinsic character, was expressed in its 
earliest and most distinctive action — its missions. The 
men Christ left behind were witnesses to His truth ; their 
ambition was to be preachers, and to increase the multi- 
tude of believers. Within the heart of the religion, the 
words, ''make disciples of all nations," seemed to work 
like a passion. Now, just consider the stupendous range, 
the magnificent ambition of this ideal universalism, with 
the undertakings and enterprises it involved. No dream 
of universal empire can be named beside it ; it was indeed 
a dream of transcendent empire, dominion over the mind 
and conscience of man. And it was an empire which meant 
peace, making all men of one spirit as of one faith, bind- 
ing earth to heaven by the golden chain of love. Even on 
the negative side its daring was extraordinary enough ; it 
denied either the truth or the sufficiency, or both, of the old 
religions. Now that was a tremendous denial. It could 
not but, where most emphatic and effective, provoke hatred 
and persecution. Christianity rose on the ancient world 
like an immense negation; it was abhorred as a "pesti- 
lential superstition," whose breath was fatal to the faiths 
venerable by age. Then, even more than now, religion 
was woven into the heart and history, into the lives and 
conditions, into the laws and customs of the peoples. It 
was less a thing of eternity , more a matter of time, bound up 
with the State, inseparable from the nation, the nation in- 
separable from it. Man was more religious as a citizen 
than even as a person ; not for his own sake was he religious, 
but for the people's. The impious man was dangerous to 
the State, because the religion belonged to the State, and 
therefore to the citizens ; not to the citizens, and therefore 



l8 THE RELIGION A SYSTEM OF POSITIVISM. 

to the State. It was a matter of public concern and cus- 
tom, and not of personal conviction and profession. It 
lived, therefore, endeared by all that exalted and glorified 
the country, hallowed by the reverence of centuries, the 
heroism of the fathers, the songs and the memories of the 
fatherland ; it was the shrine of all the ideals the past had 
transmitted to the present, and the house to which the 
present entrusted its treasures for the future. To deny the 
truth of the religion was like denying the right of the nation 
to be ; to bid the people renounce their gods was like bid- 
ding them forswear their past, and throw the order and 
civilization they had realized into irredeemable chaos. 

But while the tremendous negation was the first thing 
that struck and startled the ancient world, the cardinal 
and characteristic matter was the affirmation within and 
behind it. Christianity was a system of splendid Posi- 
tivism ; it denied only that it might the more strenuously 
affirm. It had one God for all men, Jew and Greek alike. 
It declared all men of one blood, offspring of the one God, 
kinsmen after the flesh, brothers according to the Spirit. 
It concluded all men under sin, that God might have mercy 
upon all. It proclaimed one faith, one Saviour, one salva- 
tion, commanded every man to repent, promised to all who 
believed the life and happiness of God, threatened all who 
disbelieved with indignation and wrath, tribulation and 
anguish. Its universalism was most particular, rested on 
a notion of religion that stood in absolute antithesis to the 
older and current notions. The universe it wished to create 
was a universe of convinced and converted units, not of 
imperious and coercive policies. Religion was a matter 
of spirit and conscience, the man alone could be religious, 
and even he only as hi-s reason was persuaded, his faith real, 
his life commanded by the truth. But think what an in- 



APPEALS TO MAN AS OF GOD'S KIN 1 9 

novation and dream it was to create a universal religion 
on these lines! What an idea it implied of the dignity, 
the free, yet essential reasonableness of man ! of the truth, 
the rational power, and the moral authority of the re- 
ligion! It did not appeal to the ambition of kings, the 
selfishness of States, the fears or passions of societies; 
but it stood before the personal reason and spoke to it, 
before the slumbering and awakened conscience and ap- 
pealed to it, trusting to its own might as spirit, and truth, 
and love. Man had come from God, was of God's kin 
and kind; the truth, too, had come from God; and the 
splendid faith was that the godlike affinities of man and 
the truth would find each other, meet, and blend, that 
they might bind man to God. Where else came there ever 
so sublime an ideal ? an ambition so divine ? Beside it 
the dreams of conquerors and statesmen are poor, and 
mean, and vulgar. The capabilities and dignities of 
humanity slumbered till this universalism came and waked 
them to life ; and why, but because the ideal immanent in 
our nature and the idea manifest in the truth were aHke 
of God, made and, as it were, mated in the one Eternal 
Mind ? 

IV 

I . But now this brings us to another point : the agencies 
through which this universalism was to be realized — it was 
■by Preaching, speech of the men who knew Jesus, under- 
stood His mind, and were possessed of His spirit and His 
truth. There never was an agency so simple or so effectual. 
No cause could have seemed more poorly equipped, so 
without the energies necessary for conquest, the means 
needed for bare life. It was entrusted to eleven men of Gali- 
lee. They were humble, undistinguishedmen, without birth 



20 THE FIRST PREACHERS OF THE RELIGION. 

or education, experience or knowledge of the world. They 
had been either fishermen or tax-gatherers, familiar with the 
lake and towns of Galilee, unacquainted with other lands and 
peoples. They could scarcely be said to know letters ; might 
perhaps be able to read the Hebrew Bible, but were even 
more than we are ignorant of the literature of Greece and 
Rome ; without the eye to perceive their beauties or appraise 
their wealth. Their heroes, the great men they knew and 
revered, were of their own race only : their father Abraham, 
Moses their lawgiver, David their patriot king, Solomon 
their ideal sage, Isaiah their sublime prophet. But the 
men whose names were honoured in the schools of culture, 
potent in the academies, applauded in the Forum, poets 
like Homer or Sophocles or Lucretius, philosophers like 
Plato or Aristotle or Epicurus, orators and statesmen like 
Demosthenes and Cicero, were to them utterly unknown. 
Those eleven Galileans were, in a sense, children; they 
knew not the thoughts, the doubts, the despairs, the agonies 
and passions of soul that lived and wrestled in the great 
world. Like children, they were unconscious of the 
awful tragedies that were being enacted before and around 
them, though it might be they were only the better able to 
fill the stage with a sweeter and happier presence. 

Yet they would have been a mightier enigma to the great 
world than it was to them. Imagine what Athens or Rome 
would have thought had it been told that a new religion 
had been instituted by a few Jews, and that eleven men 
of Galilee were about to essay the conversion of the world. 
You can almost hear the ripple of laughter that would run 
over either city as it heard the news. Try a parallel case : 
here is an immense capital, where, perhaps, is collected the 
largest mass of conscious wisdom in the world, where the 
English Parliament meets, where wealth and society have 



ASTONISHMENT OF THE CITIES AND IN THE CLUBS 21 

their home, where law and justice do their best to Hve in 
harmony and serve the common good ; where the makers of 
literature and the producers of books live, if not in unity, at 
least together, and an all-wise press consents to distribute 
its unerring judgments and impartial light. Well, then, 
imagine this : eleven men come here from some distant fish- 
ing village, on sea-coast or loch-side, and, undismayed, with 
calmly deliberate speech and purpose, begin, in the very 
face of London, to attempt the conversion of the world. 
You can conceive how the news would be greeted on the 
streets, in the lobby of the House, in the clubs, or the places 
where idle men and would-be wits most do congregate. 
Yet this could not seem so extravagant an enterprise as did 
that of the Galileans. The world is used to attempts at its 
conversion now, but then they were utterly undreamed of ; 
the idea of one religion, of missions on behalf of any religion, 
had never entered the sane and cultivated mind . And when 
the men who were guilty of this most adventurous and origi- 
nal idea, and the fields on which they were to realize it, were 
compared — their extravagance must have seemed touched 
with most innocent madness. Around them was Judaism, 
fanatical, furious, its appetite whetted, not glutted, by 
having tasted the blood of the Master. Before them were 
the religions glorified by the art and poetry of Greece, the 
martial and political supremacy of Rome, the wealth and 
proud antiquity of Egypt, the traditions, the customs, the 
patriotisms of all the ancient peoples. The dream of these 
men was, indeed, extraordinary; only one thing has been 
more marvellous than their dream — its fulfilment. It 
would have been wonderful, above all others to themselves, 
had they not known that ''God had chosen the foolish things 
of the world to confound the wise, and God had chosen the 
weak things of the world to confound the things that are 



22 PAUL BECOMES AN APOSTLE. 

mighty ; and base things of the world, and things which are 
despised had God chosen, yea, and things which are not to 
bring to nought things that are."* 

2. But these men were not allowed to stand long alone; 
they were soon joined by a man of richest nature and pre- 
eminent power. Born of Hebrew parents, in the Free 
City of Tarsus, he stood related, as it were, organically to 
two most dissimilar peoples, histories, minds.f From his 
parents he received the stern, intense, concentrated religious 
nature of the Hebrew, the pride and privilege of an honoured 
Abrahamic descent, possession of the oracles of God, know- 
ledge of Messianic beliefs, which were capable of the mean- 
est or noblest interpretation. From his birth in a city which 
was both Greek and Roman, and from his Greek training he 
derived his sympathy with man, his idea of a freer and 
finer manhood than Judea knew, his knowledge of heathen 
morality and religion, his insight into the pagan mind, and 
subtle ability to realize the Hellenic devotion to a faith which 
was the apotheosis of the beautiful, ahcf aversibn to a faith 
which was the deification of humility and suffering. From 
this city he derived his knowledge of Roman Law, his 
sense of the dignity of citizenship, and his idea of a State 
and city coextensive with civilized man. In his single 
person, therefore, two races and two worlds met; he was 
heir, on the one side, to Hebrew religion, literature, know- 
ledge, and could well understand the history which led up 
to Christ, and the Christ who fulfilled it; he was heir, on 
the other, to the humaner ideals, the sunnier, yet deeper 
thought, the loftier and more creative imagination of 
Greece, and could interpret at once the attitude of the 
Greco-Roman intellect to Christ, and the meaning of Christ 
to the mind, whether Roman or Greek. God made Paul 

* I Cor, i. 27-8. t '^- infra, the chapter on Paul. 



STRONG IN LOVE AND IN INTELLECT 23 

for the moment, the moment for Paul. Providence works 
through persons, and this strange strong personaHty was 
one of its chief est works. What our dainty modern criti- 
cism considers a defect was a high excellency. He was 
without culture in the academic sense ; the Greek philoso- 
phies he did not know, though when need was he had strength 
of brain and discipline enough to grasp their subtlest doc- 
trines. But he knew Greek manhood; he loved not the 
speculations, but the men of Greece. 

If he had been a child of the schools he might have been 
able to speak their language, and think their thoughts 
after them; but would he have been as open of heart to 
the common humanities? as able to enter with Divine 
simplicity the sanctuary of the new faith, to speak its mys- 
teries to the only persons who would hear ? That mind 
of Paul's is a ceaseless marvel to me : so strong in its love 
of man, willing to be accursed from Christ for the Jew ; to 
live, to die, to suffer utmost loss for the Gentile ; so strong 
in its love of truth, sundering the dearest ties to follow it, 
breaking with the past, sacrificing the present, having no 
wish to be, save as obedient to it. Think how the heart of 
him beats in those epistles of his, how the pain of despised 
love still throbs in their broken idioms and abrupt strong 
terms; how his enthusiasm for the good of man, how his 
whole massive manhood, penetrated, possessed, com- 
manded by his gospel, stands there, as it were, in everlast- 
ing motion, ever creating new and higher forms of life, with- 
out in any measure ceasing to be. And the speech which 
clothes his gospel is so wonderful ; not classical, or academic, 
or in any sense scholastic, but so living, so simple and strong, 
as of a man who had got truth, so new and so straight from 
God that he had to make the very speech which was to em- 
body it. The only parallel to Paul is Moses ; what the one 



24 WORD PREACHED BY THE APOSTLES. 

did for the old law, the other did for the new. Moses was a 
Hebrew by descent, but an Egyptian by education. By na- 
ture he understood the one people, by culture the other. He 
was a mediator between Egypt and the Hebrews, just as 
Paul was a mediator between the Hebrews and the Greeks. 
Moses carried the vine out of Egypt and planted it in Pales- 
tine, and Paul brought the living vine out of Palestine and 
planted it throughout the world. The historical Moses 
localized it that it might be the better sheltered and nour- 
ished into ripeness; Paul universalized it that it might 
gladden all people and enlighten all lands. The works were 
different, yet connected ; the first prepared for the second, 
the second was the fulfilment of the first. In each case 
the fittest workman was chosen. Ancient Hebraism vindi- 
cated God's wisdom in the choice of Moses; living Chris- 
tianity has justified His wisdom in the choice of Paul. 

V 

I . But it is not enough to study the men ; we must also 
consider the instrument they used, the Word or Gospel 
they preached. They began their mission by being wit- 
nesses of Christ, crucified and risen ; they expected to con- 
vert the world, to establish the universal and spiritual reli- 
gion by preaching Him. He was their sole theme; His 
name summarized all of truth they had to tell. The truth 
He contained was, indeed, vast, but they did not bewilder 
man by exhibiting the broad surface or immense circumfer- 
ence of the truth ; their ambition was to show it condensed 
into the point of living light, which they termed the Christ. 
Behind the presentation was their own knowledge, for with- 
out it they could not have made all the scattered rays con- 
verge into the one splendid focus; but they knew that it 
must be with all as it had been with themselves — for only 



THE CROSS A SYMBOL 25 

through faith in the person of the King could man enter into 
the Kingdom of the Truth. By what must have seemed to 
the cultured critics of the day a low and offensive perversity, 
they emphasized the humiliation, sufferings, death of the 
Christ. They had no wish to conceal any feature of His 
lowliness, any element of His shame; nay, without these, 
they would have been without their Gospel. The Christ 
they had to preach was the One who "bare our sins in 
His own body on the tree";* the most fervent prayer 
they could utter, "God forbid that I should glory, save 
in the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. "f 

The symbol was extraordinary — might have seemed 
selected expressly to offend. We are quite unable to 
imagine the deep offence it then gave. It comes to us bap- 
tized in the holiest associations, sublimed by the love, the 
faith, the achievements of centuries ; it speaks not of crime 
or of barbarous death, but of the grace that loved from 
eternity, and redeemed by a sacrifice which was the sal- 
vation of man, but the passion of God. The change Jesus 
worked in the cross was a miracle all the more wonder- 
ful that it was what men might call posthumous. All 
at once, by virtue of what He suffered on it, it ceased to 
be the sign of the felon slave's death, and became the symbol 
of a hope victorious over the grave. Since then, it has 
graced the tomb of the martyred saint, burned on the breast 
of the crusader, worked creatively in the imagination of the 
poet, been an inspiration to painters, who have painted 
on their knees, as it were in worship ; it has been pictured 
by the preacher as the emblem of peace, the ground of 
reconciliation between man and God; it has even on the 
field of battle marked the point where carnage must cease, 
and the gentle heart of woman and the skilled hand of man 

* I Peter ii. 24. f Gal. vi. 14. 



26 THE OFFENCE TO GREEK LOVE BEAUTIFUL. 

be allowed to minister tenderly to the dying, and to do for 
the wounded their healing and beneficent work. But in the 
apostolic age, the Cross meant only guilt and shame; it 
was the symbol of what was meanest in life, most infamous 
in act, and criminal in death. No man loved it, of all 
men it was hated and abhorred; doubly hated of the 
free born, as the instrument of death at once of a criminal 
and a slave. But this abhorred cross was the object in 
which the apostles gloried, and placed in the forefront as the 
symbol of their universal religion, the very epitome of the 
Word that saved. Just think how this would strike a 
stranger — say a Greek. He loved the beautiful ; his 
religion was so steeped in it, that he could not tell where 
religion ended and art began. The poets had in immortal 
verse praised the beauty of the gods. The temples where 
he worshipped, whether severe in Doric simplicity or rich 
in Corinthian ornament, seemed like dreams of architec- 
tural beauty suddenly realized in stone. Sculptors had 
idealized the human form, that it might the more fitly be 
the symbol of the Divine ; and had so splendidly succeeded, 
that men felt when they looked -on the Zeus of Phidias, as if 
they had seen the very image and face of God . Now, imagine 
a man whose mind so inseparably associated the religious 
and the beautiful — who believed with Plato that the beau- 
tiful, like the good, was only another name for the Divine — 
suddenly confronted with the doctrine of the Cross, sum- 
moned to believe that God had been manifested in One 
who had lived as a Jewish peasant, and had died crucified 
between two thieves. Was it possible that such a doctrine 
should seem other to him than the apotheosis of the ab- 
horrent ? Need we wonder that he scornfully declared it 
no wisdom of God, but utter ''foolishness of man" ?* 

* I Cor. i. 21. 



THE APOSTLES IN BONDS TO THEIR SYMBOL 27 

2. The apostles knew right well what the Jew and the 
Gentile alike thought. Their preaching of the Cross was 
no matter of will or pleasure, but of sheer and simple neces- 
sity; for only so, and not otherwise, could the truth be 
spoken, and man be saved. Do you think that Paul did 
not know how his gospel appeared to the Greek ? or the 
sort of insult it seemed to the Jew ? If he had been under 
any illusion, ''stripes and imprisonment"* would soon have 
dispelled it. But he was under none. Every letter he wrote 
bears the ineffaceable imprint of his pain and his heroism 
before the shame of the Cross. He was a man of rarely sen- 
sitive soul, of imagination so strong that the thoughts of 
other men lived before his mind almost as if they had been 
his own. He could feel the very loathing of the Greek, and 
the passion which burned in the Jew. There is nothing that 
so shows to me the power of Paul's spirit, or the pathos of 
his position, as the way in which he stood between two 
strong emotions and ruled both — the emotion created by 
his own knowledge of the truth, and the emotion created 
by his knowledge of what it seemed to men when they first 
heard it. He had to speak, most vividly conscious that 
what was the grace of God to him was to them the worst 
foolishness of men.f And his apostolic strength lay here, 
that, while possessed of this most paralyzing of all knowledge, 
he had the devotion and endurance to speak and to persuade 
till his standpoint became theirs, and his love displaced and 
extinguished their loathing. 

But that we may understand what ''the doctrine of the 
Cross" did mean to the then world we, too, must change 
our point of view ; and look at it from within rather than 
from without. That doctrine was mighty from what it 
signified to the spirit, not from what it seemed to the senses. 

* 2 Cor. vi, 5; xi. 23-7. t i Cor. i. 23-5. 



28 WHAT THE SYMBOL SIGNIFIED TO THE CHRISTIANS. 

A new Godhead was in it, a new Humanity, a new whole 
spiritual Universe. It was the symbol in time of the very 
Godhead of God, of verities as old as eternity, though only 
then become manifest. Man is made by his thought of 
God ; as he thinks of God, nature and life are to him, nay, 
he is to himself. God was to the Greek inflexible law, or 
retributive and iron fate, the order which was stern to 
punish, though impotent to save. There was nothing 
so undivinely merciless as the divine beauty of Greece. 
The Greek knew no love to God, for the love of God was 
to him unknown . His ideal deity was the Zeus of Aeschy los, 
an inexorable will, able to be supreme only by being retribu- 
tive, as pitiless to a beneficent Prometheus as to a guilty 
Klutemnestra. Plato made love divine, but abstract love 
is love without life, is no object of affection, and can awaken 
none. To live in a universe where no pity reigns, which has 
no heart of grace, is to live in a hell ; the men it imprisons 
come to hate their home, to abhor their life, and prove 
themselves greater than their universe by defying it, by 
challenging its pitiless forces to work their death. The 
Jew might seem happier than the Greek; his God was 
personal, eternal, the Creator and Sovereign of man. But 
there are no sadder laments over the transiency of life 
and the mortality of man than those we owe to the Jew. 
His God was too remote from men to be touched with 
humanity; the God of the Jew only, w^as no Deity for 
universal man. 

3. But the doctrine of Christ changed God to man, and 
man to God. He was the Son of the Eternal, and the 
eternal Son. Fatherhood was immanent in Deity, who 
had never been other than a Father, which signified that 
love was as eternal as Himself; to have a Son was essen- 
tial to His being as God. The love within was the basis 



THE SON ESSENTIAL TO THE FATHER'S LOVE 29 

of the love without; the internal activities of God were 
but His affections in exercise, and so His external activi- 
ties could not but be the same. And thus the creation 
stood in the affection of the Godhead, shared, as it were, 
the affection of the Father for the Son. And so man stood 
on earth the child of the Eternal, the offspring of God, 
bound to Him by the divinest of all ties — that of the love 
which had brooded over him even before it had called him 
into being. But where man and God were so united, the sin 
of man became the sorrow of God, the guilt of the Son in- 
volved the pain of the Father. Men have spoken of the 
Divine impassibility ; they have said, ' ' Deity is perfect, the 
perfect must be the happy, and the perfectly happy cannot 
suffer." But it were an empty happiness that never knew 
love, and a callous love which never knew sorrow at the 
sight of sin. Sacrifice is a fact of the eternal nature; the 
death of Christ was its symbol and manifestation in time. 
That death declared that man's sin meant God's passion, 
that God could not bear to lose the soul He loved. Nor 
could He save it without such sacrifice as showed His 
vengeance against sin and love of righteousness. And so, 
in the Cross, there was found a point from which man, 
looking upward, could see God as God sees Himself; and, 
looking at once inward and outward, could know man as 
man is known to God. From that double view there came 
a light which changed the shame of the Cross into sur- 
passing glory, made all things in heaven and on earth new, 
and forced from the lips the cry, '*0 the depth of the riches 
both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how un- 
searchable are His judgments and His ways past finding 
out!"* 

4. But the doctrine of the Cross in being interpretative 

* Rom. xi. ;^;^. 



30 RELIGION AS ARTICULATORY OF IDEA. 

of God was also recreative of man. The response to the new 
faith was the new rehgion ; the behef in the Divine Father- 
hood found its reahzation in a conscious human sonship, 
conformed in spirit and character to Christ's. The God 
who had loved man unto sacrifice was a God man was 
bound to love unto obedience. But the love that could 
not bear to lose, implied the dearness of the being saved to 
the Being who saved him. Man could contribute to the 
happiness of God ; God loved to hold fellowship with man. 
The doctrine of the Cross based religion on this mutual 
love — the Divine, creative; the human, responsive; and 
the doctrine made manifest that man was to God what 
Jesus had been, with its necessary counterpart, that God 
was to man what He had been to Jesus. The sacrifice that 
saved was explained by a life which showed how the saved 
were to live. 

Now, this affected and changed the very idea of re- 
ligion. Man, in order to worship God, had employed 
holy persons — priests ; holy places — altars and temples ; 
holy rites and seasons — acts and days of atonement. 
Without these, religion was impossible; men could not 
feel safe from God unless priest, temple and sacrifice stood 
between Him and them. But the Cross abolished these; 
grace reconciled the Father in heaven, and the sons on 
earth lived in immediate fellowship. And this open inter- 
course, this filial immediacy of communion and speech, was 
of the very essence of Christ's own ideal. The religion 
He instituted was absolutely without the most distinctive 
elements of the old religious institutions. It knew no 
priesthood — had nothing for any priesthood to do, had no 
material temple, the spirit of the new man being the temple 
of the living God ; it had no fleshly sacrifices either, man's 
"reasonable service" being a living sacrifice which alone 



A CHANGED GOD IS A CHANGED RELIGION 3 1 

was acceptable to God * Christ therefore called no disciple 
a priest, endowed none with priestly functions ; made His 
collective society a holy and spiritual priesthood, but did 
not equip it with any priestly class. A completer act of 
abolition was impossible, or one of mightier moment and 
significance. It meant that His people, like Himself, were 
sons; that the filial relation was too direct and sacred to 
suffer any alien to intermeddle with it ; that the fellowship 
ought to be so clear and close as to make the child feel as if 
his spirit were a mirror of his Father's heart. The man who 
knows himself a happy and reconciled son, feels the priest's 
a divisive presence. So deeply did this enter into the ideal 
of the new religion, that it is only sober truth to say — 
the degree in which a system restores a priesthood, is the 
measure of its departure from Christ. The men who seek 
through ritual, ceremonial, or sacrifice to worship God, 
prefer bondage under the ancient schoolmaster,! who was 
a creature of the poor and burdensome law, to the spirit 
and adoption of sons. 

All that this doctrine implied may not here be told. 
The ideal of a new world was in it, forces reconstructive 
of humanity worked in its bosom. No such centre of 
new moral, religious, revolutionary energies had ever come 
out of eternity into time. Infinite promise was in it for 
individual souls, regenerative agencies, ameliorative and 
progressive forces, boundless hopes and highest possibilities 
for the race. Silently, without noise of the builder's tools, 
the new Jerusalem had descended out of heaven from God ; 
softly, unperceived by the coarse senses of statesmen and 
thinkers, there had fallen the seeds of a new mankind, which 
was to be organized in faith and love unto righteousness. 

* Rom. xii. i. f Gal. iii, 24-5. 



32 THE AGE IN WHICH THE RELIGION LIVED. 

VI 

1 . But it is not enough to study the new religion, we must 
also glance at the age in which it lived. Over against the 
Church stood the world it was to conquer. The forces 
seemed so disproportionate that to have spoken of a con- 
flict then would have been too grotesque even for pleasantry. 
Now we know that they did meet in the most terrible and 
deadly struggle known to history. The Church did not 
come out of it scathless or uninjured, but Rome did not 
issue from it alive. 

Of Judaism it is not necessary to speak ; the nation as 
distinct from the people that professed it was in the agonies 
of death. Providence suffered it not to live. The Jews 
helped the new faith in the most efficient possible way, 
by bringing about the ruin of their capital and their re- 
ligion. Few things could have served the cause of Christ 
so well as the fall of Jerusalem. It saved His faith from 
its greatest danger, prevented it making the soil of Judea 
sacred, Jerusalem its holy city; and cast it, as it were, 
homeless upon the Gentiles. So we need not touch Juda- 
ism; the first of the Christian generations saw its defeat. 
The Judaic thought that attempted to penetrate and trans- 
form the new gospel was vanquished by Paul; the spell 
which the ancient traditions, customs and places, were begin- 
ning to exercise over the new religion, was for ever broken 
by the legions of Vespasian. 

2. We note, as a thing not friendly to Christianity, the 
political condition. Rome was in the proudest moment 
of her imperial history, and reigned undisputed queen 
of the civilized world. There never was so perfect a politi- 
cal machine alike for purposes of conquest and of rule; 
so masterful, yet so tolerant, so irresistible in its imperial 



THE UNITY OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 33 

strength, yet so mindful of national susceptibilities. She 
had gathered into her mighty network the ancient empires 
of the east and south, Western Persia, Egypt, Carthage, 
Greece, and the nascent peoples of the west and north. 
And where Roman armies went, Roman Law followed; 
universal conquest meant political unity, and an order 
— if need be, a solitude — which was at least outward 
peace. Now, this imperial unity did in some respects 
help the new faith. Resistance to Rome was so hopeless 
that, in its presence, national ambitions died. The en- 
forced peace of the peoples made many a generous spirit 
turn for consolation to the mysteries of religion ; for exer- 
cise, to the problems of life and destiny. The one em- 
pire created a feeling of oneness among the nations, made 
them form a sort of brotherhood, and so paved the way for 
the idea of a common religion. Then, too, the rule of the 
one city secured to the Roman citizen, however he came 
by his freedom, rights and a home everywhere, and so over 
those Christian missionaries who were Roman citizens was 
thrown the aegis of its great power. Then intercourse was 
easy, roads made the remotest provinces accessible; the 
imperial, though not the universal, tongue was so known in 
all Roman cities that the preacher who could use it was a 
man who could be everywhere understood. But the unity 
was advantageous only while the empire was propitious; 
let it be hostile, and what then? Why, it could every- 
where and at once bring all the engines of an irresistible 
and relentless government to bear on anything it wished 
to suppress, especially if they were things of faith. In 
every city, from Palestine to Britain, from the Atlantic to 
the Euphrates, it could act as it willed against what it hated. 
It might well seem that Caesar had but to nod, and the iron 
feet of his legions would soon break into pieces the small 



34 THE MORAL AND SOCIAL STATE. 

societies which the Christian missionaries had been so 
painfully labouring to form. At any suggestion of their 
strength, he would have laughed louder than leviathan ever 
did at the shaking of a spear. 

3. Hence a fact within the age determining its attitude 
to the religion, and a condition afifecting the action of the 
religion on it, is its moral and social state. The moral 
systems of antiquity are even now our most perfect systems 
— their ethical ideal remains a noble ideal. The good man 
Plato loved to imagine and picture, still appeals to our 
admiration and love. What claims to be our best culture 
studies and praises the Aristotelian mean, with its balanced 
and harmonious activities. The Stoic doctrine supplies us 
with an idea of strong and upright manliness. What specu- 
lation then could do for morals was done in the ancient 
world; its science was perfect, though its conduct was at 
fault. But the fault was disastrous; it meant that the 
mind which could dream the beautiful could not do the 
good. The theoretical spirit was indeed still young and 
stoical. Seneca lived on the ethical field, the rival, if not 
the kinsman, of Paul. Epictetus, too, was learning to 
suffer and abstain, that he might, by word and action, 
show the sort of man the gods loved. And in the near 
future Marcus Aurelius stood, great as an emperor, greater 
as a philosopher, greatest as a man. Juvenal and Persius, 
too, were watching evil with keen eyes; and if satire or 
cynicism could have killed the Vices, those of this age had 
utterly died. But to paint virtue and scotch vice is not 
to create righteousness. Thought is noble only when it 
makes noble being; the ignoble living of an age is the 
saddest reproof of its noble teaching, because a testimony 
to its impotence. The moral system that pleases the reason, 
but does not exercise the will, debauches the conscience. 



VICE, AMUSEMENTS, SPORT, WAR 35 

And the ancient moral systems showed the right, but gave 
neither the power nor the will to do it. 

The contrast between the ideal and the actual in morals 
was sharp and strong. Here and there types of the ancient 
Roman virtue could be found, but virtuous individuals 
do not make a virtuous time; the stars shine bright in 
the darkest night, but they do not make light enough to 
chase its blackness away. The Nero who fiddled while 
Rome burned was the pupil of Seneca. The wicked em- 
perors before and after Marcus Aurelius, — deified none the 
less that they were so abhorred, — made sad mockery of 
his pious meditations. The divine honours they received 
witnessed to the worst of all moral conditions — insen- 
sibility to the horror and shame of hideous and inhuman 
vice, with its invariable correlate, insusceptibility to the 
touch and inspiration of goodness and truth. Nothing is 
more significant of national character and condition than 
national amusements; find the pastimes of a people, and 
you will find what quality and spirit they are of. And 
throughout the Roman Empire there was nothing that 
amused like the amphitheatre. There thousands of men 
and women would gather to watch men fight with wild 
beasts or wilder men, often in pairs that could be counted 
by hundreds. The gladiator was the new hero of Rome, his 
brutal bravery the admiration of the city. The passion 
for blood so burned in the heart of Roman woman that she 
seldom spared the vanquished; the agonies of the dy- 
ing added zest to the scene. If such was the sport, what 
must have been the earnest of the people ? War, always 
brutal, was savage then; captives were either butchered 
in cold blood, or sold as slaves. Human life had no sanc- 
tity; if domestic economy required it, the child was ex- 
posed, the slave killed, or the troublesome relative poi- 



36 THE RELIGIOUS LIKE THE MORAL ORDER. 

soned. There are no records of crime and lust like the 
histories of the imperial families. Even religion was im- 
pure, human sacrifices were not unknown; the temples 
and the mysteries were scenes of debaucheries and sins for 
which our speech has, happily, no name. Imagine the 
tenderest of faiths and this hard and wicked age, face to face 
with each other, and does it not seem like a grim satire to 
say the pitiful faith was to prove mightier than the pitiless 
empire ? 

4. Alongside the moral, the religious state of the age 
must be placed; each corresponded to the other. The 
contrast of the ancient to the modern idea of religion has 
already been noted ; personal conviction is essential to the 
modern idea, public observance was of the essence of 
the ancient. Make religion a thing of civil law, and the 
cardinal matter is conformity; personal conviction is 
secondary or unimportant. The man who does what the 
law requires of him is religious; the ordinance of man 
exhausts the claims of God. Make a legal statute the 
stay of religion, and religion is repealed; the act that 
makes it a civil institution abolishes its spiritual ideal. 
That might almost be said to be the thesis which the an- 
cient religions were set to prove, and they proved it on 
the most stupendous scale. They showed how men, by 
conviction the most sceptical, could be as citizens the most 
pious, conforming to all the sacred customs, because they 
were civil institutions; how statesmen who denied and 
scorned all religion, yet supported it as a matter of national 
safety and law. Gibbon, in his ironical way, only speaks 
the truth when he says of this very time, ''The various 
modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world, 
were all considered by the people as equally true, by the 
philosopher as equally false, and by the magistrate as 



GIBBON CLASSIFIES RELIGION; VARRO THEOLOGY 37 

equally useful."* In so saying he but paraphrases the 
words of Varro, who divided theology into three kinds — 
mythical, physical, and civil — the first being specially 
adapted to the theatre, the second to the world, the third 
to the city.t What the philosopher thought of the gods, 
whether they were or were not, was his own concern ; but, 
all the same, his duty as a citizen was to see that the worship 
of them was duly performed. 

Where men so thought of religion, it was impossible 
that it could have any moral significance — be a comfort 
to the reason, or a joy to the heart. It was, indeed, utterly 
divorced from morality; godliness did not mean goodness; 
to be pious was not to be virtuous. The gods loved sac- 
rifices, but did not care for moral obedience. The philoso- 
phers, not the priests, were the teachers of virtue. The 
schools, not the temples, were the guardians of morals. A 



* Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. ii. " The policy of tolera- 
tion " which he ascribes to " the Emperors and the Senate," " happily, 
seconded by the reflections of the enlightened and by the habits of the 
superstitious," Gibbon seems to imagine to have been produced and 
promoted by the reigning scepticism. No man could be blinder than he, 
especially if he did not want to see, or he would have asked how it hap- 
pened that the ancient principle was reversed in England, where the 
most religious were also the most tolerant men. By asking this question 
he would have discovered why the sceptic was the man who least 
loved either toleration or liberty. In a note he says : " Some obscure 
traces of an intolerant spirit appear in the conduct of the Egyptians " 
{Juv. Sat., XV.). [This is the famous satire where the people of Tentyra 
assail the citizens of Ombi for their worship of the crocodile.] Gibbon does 
not stand alone in so severely judging or rejecting Christianity (see Renan, 
Les Apotres, p. 315). Another side of the matter — the conflict between 
the authorities of Law and Religion, or the notions of empire and con- 
science — can be seen in Dollinger's Heidenthum und Judenthum, 
pp. 610-15. 

f Varro, A pud August., De Civitate Dei, vi. 5. Augustine, who is 
rather critical of his authorities, explains ixvdos by " fabulous," on the 
ground that ixvdos originally meant " fable," and was best represented by 
fahulare. 



^8 A RELIGION WITHOUT MORALITY 

religion without morality soon becomes an immoral reli- 
gion; the religious emotions and sanctions, deprived of 
ethical quality and control, become the most debased and 
pernicious forces that can act within the spirit of man. So 
we are not surprised that Lucretius should have described 
religion as an oppressive burden to man, a monster of hor- 
rible aspect, which lowered upon mortals, and gave birth to 
abominable and unholy deeds* Men as grave as Strabo 
could speak of the mythologies as bugbears invented 
to amuse childish people,! and men as brilliant as Lucian 
knew not what better to do with their wit than satirize 
the lying and knavery of religion 4 So little was there 

* De Natura, lib. i, 65. 

f Geog. X. Strabo, the " squint-eyed," was in philosophy a stoic, and is 
spoken of by Plutarch as a philosopher (Zeller, Griech. Philos., iv, 587 note). 
See his definitions in his account of philosophy which are pure stoicism, in 
the opening of Lib. i. Strabo inclined as a stoic to cast the mythology into 
a narrative of the creative process, and so it has been well said that he 
cast aside Euhemerus as " almost a proverb for mendacity " (Lib. ii, 
Falconer's Ed. pp. 139-140; Grote, Hist, of Greece, vol. i, p. 553. Ed. 
185 1 ). Yet as a geographer who tried to be an historian, he thought that 
he could, by removing extravagances and poetical licences and tran- 
scribers' mistakes, restore the myth to its original form and truth. Lib. i, 
which is mainly occupied with Homer, who is considered as the first (p. 10) 
of geographers, and their prince (Lib. xiii, p. 863), as well as poet and 
mythologist. It is not true, however, to say that Strabo thinks of Zeus 
simply as a man. The root of everything is his jealousy for God as infinite. 

X Among the works which are here regarded is De Morte Peregrint, 
and I am half inclined to hold the satire as based on the study of 
the Ignatian history (Renan, Les Evangiles, pp. 493-4). The Demonax 
has, indeed, though for reasons I hold to be insufiicient, been denied to 
be by Lucian (Bernays' Lucian und die Kyniker, pp. 104-5). Alexan- 
der Pseudomantis. The treatise is remarkable, not only for the 
portrait of the impostor, but also for the bringing forward of a 
Celsus, who is not Origen's foe. Yet on this point I would not be 
dogmatic, as many scholars who have studied the question closely 
hold the opposite opinion. (See Mosheim's Preface to the translation in 
German of Origen's /cara KAcrov; Keim's translation of Celsus' Wahres 
Wort, pp. 275 £f. ; Renan's view may also be seen in his Hist, of the Origin 
of Christianity, vols, v, vi, and vii). Philopseudes, or the incredulous man ; 



TOO MUCH FOR ROMAN STRENGTH 39 

in it to invigorate or cheer, that Roman strength bent 
under the burden of existence; and men as philosophic 
as Pliny, the elder, doubting, despairing of all truth, sadly 
concluded that the greatest good reserved to man was 
"the power of taking his own life.*" Indeed, so de- 
praved had the very conception of Deity become that 
the people were prepared to accord divine honours to the 
most wicked of men when powerful enough to set himself 
up for a god. We have but to compare such a use of the 
Divine name with what is possible now to see how far we 
have travelled since then; to see this, too, that a new 
notion of the Divine has been the main factor in the for- 
ward movement. 

VII 

I . We have now come to the point where we may watch 
the meeting of these two forces, so utterly unlike and so 
unequally matched — the doctrine of the Crucified, 
preached by the men of Galilee and the man of Tarsus, 



and PhilopatHs, though the latter is not here regarded as really by Lucian. 
Harnack in his index calls Lucian "the mocker." Adolf Planck has an 
admirable and exhaustive paper on his relation to Christianity in the 
Studien und Kritiken for 185 1. Baur has an excellent sketch of him in 
his Kirchengeschichte, i, 409 ff., Eng. translation, vol. ii, pp. 1675. So also 
in his Apollonius von Tyana; cf. Keim, Vorwort. Renan, who frequently 
alludes to him, speaks of him in one note as more a "romancer than a 
historian of philosophy " (cf. Zeller's account of him, iv, pp. 820-1). 

* xxxvi, 24. Gibbon has a paragraph in his famous chapter on Roman 
Law (xliv) dealing with its teaching on suicide, where bespeaks of suicides 
as classed by Virgil among " the unfortunate rather than the guilty " 
(iEneid, vi, 434 £f). For the mediaeval notion of suicide cf. Dante's Inferno, 
c. xiii, where the second round of his seventh circle takes him and his 
guide into the mystic wood, where the souls of self-murderers are 
imprisoned in stunted trees. The canto ends with a remarkable 
line: " lo fei giubetto a me delle mie case." The house must be 
interpreted as an allegory, which is with Dante a favourite form of 
speech. 



40 THE COLLISION OF CHRISTIANITY 

and the Roman Empire, the colossal anti-Christ * as it 
was termed, whose gigantic figure filled alike the earth and 
the sea.f Judged a priori, no enterprise was ever so ex- 
travagant, so altogether impossible of success, as the con- 
flict of Christianity with Rome. Its preachers were men 
rude of speech, which was couched in an idiom foreign and 
provincial, offensive alike to the common and the culti- 
vated ear. Their symbol was so abhorrent, their doctrine 
so incredible, that to expect a victory through belief seemed 
beyond the dreams even of a visionary. But, in this most 
illustrious case, fact was stranger than fiction. The rude 
men obeyed their Master, tried His doctrine and method, 
and triumphed. Nor had they to wait long for victory ; it 
may be said to have been won by the men who marched in 
the van, by the first generation of preachers. Fanatical 
prejudice met them, and was overcome. In the city where 
their Master had been crucified, and where the hatred was 
intense enough to crucify themselves, they preached and 
prevailed. Persecution, indeed, drove them out of the 
city, but only that they might the better serve the cause it 
hated. And even Judea and Syria soon became fields too 
narrow for their ambition. They followed the scattered 
people of Israel, passed into the Grecian cities of Asia Minor, 
crossed to the islands, then to the mainland of Greece, and, 
finally, laboured in the cities of Italy, Gaul, Spain, Africa. 
Scepticism, pride of intellect, immorality, idolatry met 
and persecuted them, but could not arrest their glorious 
career. The man of Tarsus was here the mightiest worker, 
making known to the men he best knew the Gospel he 
loved. Without weariness, without fear, unhasting, un- 
resting, by force of reason, by appeals to the heart and con- 
science, speaking to the Jews as a Jew, J when he quoted 

* I John ii. 18-22; iv. 3, f Rev. xii. 12. | i Cor. ix. 20; Acts xiii. 14-16. 



AND THE ROMAN EMPIRE 4I 

Moses and the prophets, but speaking to the Greeks as a 
Greek, where he quoted inscriptions on their akars and 
words from their poets,* he preached the truth he had 
received. And though sometimes called a *'babbler,"t 
a man "beside himself, "J *'mad,"§ ''a mover of sedi- 
tion," || who "turned the world upside-down " ;][ though 
his speech was despised as ' ' rude, "** his presence as ' ' weak, ' ' 
or "mean,"tt and his doctrine as "foolishness, "{J yet 
he preached on, cheered by finding that even where least 
successful "some clave unto him,"§§ while in kindlier 
places "the Word of God grew mightily and prevailed."! ||| 
And when, worn out with his living to Christ, he lay in a 
Roman dungeon, waiting "the hour of his departure," If 1[ 
he could look on a multitude of churches lighting up with 
new splendour the shores of the storied Aegean, and even 
running like a belt of golden glory round the vast Roman 
Empire. As he thought of his weakness, yet looked at his 
work, there might well break spontaneously from his 
lips the words: "Now unto Him who is able to do ex- 

* I Cor. ix. 21 ; Acts xvii. 22, 23, 28. With all its strangeness the 
method of the discourse on the Areopagus is strictly Pauline ; note the 
part played by the men of Israel in the sermon at Antioch (xiii. 16) and 
the men of Athens here (xvii. 22) ; and note how little he can get under 
weigh without a text in either case, though in the one he quotes the Old 
Testament, in the other an inscription he has found on an altar. 

f Acts xvii. 18. Professor Sir W. M. Ramsay translates Babbler by 
" ignorant plagiarists " {St. Paul the Traveller, p. 24). Passow, sub voce, 
a-jrepixokbyos, renders (a) a crow or rook as a bird who " picks up seeds " ; 
then (jS) a person who exists by doing the same, in places where seeds can 
be found in plenty, as in markets or beside altars ; then (7) it is said to 
mean " a poor, vulgar, common man," ignorant, talkative, wheedling, 
parasitic, slovenly, a vagrant rascal, who indulges his whim at the public 
expense. 

t Acts xxvi. 24 ; 2 Cor. v. 13. § Acts xxvi. 25 ; i Cor. xiv. 23. 

II Acts xxiv. 5. ^ Acts xvii. 6. 

** I Cor. ii. I, 4 ; 2 Cor. xi. 6. ff 2 Cor. x. 10. ' 

XX I Cor. i. 18, 21, 23, 25. §§ Acts xvii. 34. 

nil Acts xix. 20. ^^ 2 Tim. iv. 6. 



42 TIME AND THE MOVEMENT; CHANGES 

ceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, ac- 
cording to the power that worketh in us, unto Him be 
glory in the Church by Christ Jesus, throughout all ages, 
world without end. Amen." * 

2 . But now this movement must in some v/ay be measured, 
and its magnitude indicated. Bear in mind the starting 
point: the year a.d. 30 opens on the obscure, unknown 
Nazarene, the year 32 closes on His shameful and for- 
saken death. Twenty years later, in 52, the oldest Pauline 
Epistle is written; within the next six years Galatians, 
I and 2 Corinthians, and Romans are composed ; in about 
four more years their author dies. Before his death the 
Epistle of James had appeared; soon after it the first of 
Peter, 'the Apocalypse, and the Epistle to the Hebrews. 
In about twenty more years the Fourth Gospel and the 
Epistles of John have come to close the wondrous history, 
to show its cause, read its reason, and draw its lesson. 
Now, honestly face these facts, and ask. What do they 
mean? Look at the four great Pauline Epistles; only 
twenty-five years divide them from the dark moment of 
the Cross. It is easy to count the years, but can we, from 
the standpoint of religion and religious thought, measure 
the distance? Could we compute how far in the interval 
mind had travelled upwards in its estimate and inter- 
pretation of the Christ, whether the new religion could 
have been without it, or what by its divine energies have 
been achieved? Science loves to expatiate on the dif- 
ference and the distance between the Ptolemaic and the 
Copernican systems. Can it calculate for us the space that 
divides Caiaphas' or Pilate's view of Jesus from the Pauline? 
or tell the difference the change from the one to the other 
has made to man? The change was not imaginative, but 

* Eph. iii, 20, 21. 



INTELLECTUAL, MORAL, AND SOCIAL 43 

intellectual, not mythical, but rational, and did not simply 
affect the idea or person of Jesus, but the conception of 
the universe, of man, of history, and of God. The power 
of the movement lay in the infinite significance of this 
change; the secret that had from eternity lived in the 
bosom of the Father came forth and stood manifested in 
the Christ. To know Him was to know the last mystery 
of God, the infinite grace which was His glory and our 
salvation. 

3. But the intellectual change is only one side of the 
matter ; the moral and social was even greater. Study the 
mere facts. In the year a.d. 33 a few Galilean fishermen 
were seeking liberty of speech and worship in Jerusalem, 
and were hardly handled as poor and ignorant men. In 
the year that Paul died how did the matter stand? There 
were churches in Jerusalem, in Nazareth, in Caesarea, in all 
Syria; churches in Antioch, Ephesus, Galatia, Sardis, 
Laodicea, in all the towns on the coast and throughout 
Lesser Asia ; churches in Philippi, in Thessalonica, Athens, 
Corinth, in the chief cities of the islands and mainland 
of Greece; churches in Rome, in Alexandria, and in the 
Western Roman colonies. For the most part the churches 
were formed of poor men, but also of a few rich. In Rome, 
Caesar's household had been reached, possibly, even kins- 
men and kinswomen of his had been drawn into the Chris- 
tian society. And one thing marked all these societies — 
the men they attracted experienced an extraordinary 
change of nature, which elevated their character and altered 
their temper and conduct and the tendency of their action. 
Look at the New Testament writings, think of the men 
who produced them, the circle whence they came, the age 
in which they lived. One was a physician — the author of 
the third Gospel, which bears his name, and the Acts — but 



44 MEN AND CHURCHES ARE ALIKE APOSTOLIC. 

what were the others ? Matthew was a pubHcan ; Peter, 
James, and John were fishermen; Paul was a weaver of 
CiHcian cloth; yet these men, and men such as these, 
produce a literature so morally pure, so delicate and re- 
fined, so mentally strong, so true and vivid in its history, 
so intense, exalted, universal in its religious thought and 
feeling, as to be by indefeasible right our most Sacred Book. 

And as were the men, so were the churches they formed ; 
they made societies like themselves ; enforced on all a spirit 
and conduct akin to their own, and, considering the ma- 
terial on which they had to work, they succeeded in a re- 
markable, indeed, an altogether miraculous degree. And 
so in all the churches there was intense religious and intel- 
lectual activity. The apostles were not the only preachers ; 
their disciples and converts became missionaries as well. 
Opinion was not uniform, but varied, diversified. Mind 
was agitated, exercised about the great facts and doctrines 
that had so suddenly taken possession of it, their relation to 
the man, to his old religion, to his new life, to sin, death, 
immortality, God. The profound problems raised by the 
new faith were discussed in all the churches ; and through 
these discussions the Apostolic Epistles were shot like 
words of wisdom and of light. Every church became an 
epitome of society ; all men were to be what every church 
was. It was simply a brotherhood ; to be a member of one 
church was to be free to all, to be a Christian was to be a 
universal friend. The expansion in thought had its 
counterpart in the expanded life; men became as much 
more to man as God had become to him. The new faith 
was seen to create, wherever it came, a new mankind. 

4. And now, why had the doctrine of Christ so wonder- 
ful a career? Why did it create in these few years so ex- 
traordinary a revolution? why did it achieve so remarkable 



WHY THE CHURCHES SO LIVED AND GREW 45 

progress And why has it continued to be as it was at 
first? These are large questions not to be answered in a 
few concluding sentences. We speak not here of special 
endowments, common or miraculous gifts of the Spirit, but 
only of the normal agencies and methods of the primitive 
churches and their apostolic men. For one thing neither 
they nor their societies were burdened by any past; they 
made history, were not made by it. The Spirit of God 
was in them, and they obeyed it, certain that to serve 
the living present men must speak the truth of the living 
God. Then they were without official sanctities; for once 
in the history of man there was a religion without a priest- 
hood ; men speaking of God in reasonable words to reason- 
able men. The teacher was the man of knowledge; to 
ignorance there was given its natural rights, which were 
simply those of being silent and learning; to wisdom its 
natural duties, which involved the right to teach and to 
lead. There was no sacred caste, no rites too holy for the 
multitude; all the brethren were saints, all saints were 
brethren ; and to the pure all things were pure, to the holy 
man all mysteries of God were open and free. Then the 
Gospel was preached, and the men who believed lived 
as they believed ; by speech and life the new religion lived 
and moved. The supreme doctrine was the doctrine of 
the Cross; without it there was no word that saved. But 
it was never preached as a mere detached or isolated frag- 
ment; a visible point looking out of palpable darkness. 
Had it been so preached, it would never have prevailed. 
Let both the Gospels and Apostolic Epistles show how it 
was preached; it was set in living relation to the whole 
realm of thought, to the world of being and action. A 
centre, to be a centre, must have a circumference ; the man 
who does not, now and then, make his people feel the 



46 THE TRUTH A CENTRE WITH A CIRCUMFERENCE 

immense circumference of the truth, with all the lines radi- 
ating from the centre towards it, does not preach the Gospel. 
But the circumference, to be a circumference, must have a 
centre ; and the man who does not stand in the centre, speak 
to all men and look at all things from it, is a man who will 
never feel or make others feel that there is any circum- 
ference whatever; will never see himself, or make others 
see, the beauty of the converging and radiating lines. 
Here, in the vital centre, the apostles stood, and their 
work was the splendid work we have seen; here, too, 
let us stand, coveting their spirit, emulating their zeal, 
imitating their methods, and we shall bear our part in 
making the kingdoms of the world, the kingdoms of our 
God and of His Christ. 



II 



THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION IN THE 
NINETEENTH CENTURY* 

I 

THE nineteen Christian centuries that lie now almost 
completed behind us, form the most momentous 
chapter in the history of man, richer by far in all that makes 
for his good than the unnumbered centuries that went be- 
fore. This pre-eminence they owe to the presence of the 
Spirit of Christ, which lives only as it works. It is that 
Spirit, and what it has attempted and achieved, that most 
and best distinguishes the modern from the ancient world, 
the new from the old civilization. Yet, though these cen- 
turies reveal in clear and indubitable fact the character and 
potency of the Christian religion, they have not exhausted 
its best possibilities, or called all its energies into play. 
They have been conditioned in their development by the 
churches. These churches are not the religion but its 
mightiest and most characteristic creation; and through 
them it has acted, and still acts, most directly on man and 
in history. They represent its being, and interpret its 
truth to the world, which judges the religion by the churches, 
not the churches by the religion. But the very best of 
them do not realize the ideal of Jesus ; the most they can 
do is to make an attempt at it the less perfect the more it 
claims finality. In every church, as in every man, there 

* Address from the chair of the Congregational Union, delivered at 
Sheffield in the autumn of 1883. 

47 



4^ THE CHURCHES MODES OF THE RELIGION. 

is a double self, each with its own life; the one is spiritual, 
descends out of heaven from God ; and the other, which is 
at once formal and material, proceeds from man and is 
of the earth. What is achieved through the Spirit may 
be done by one church, but is the common possession 
and glory of all the churches; what is performed in the 
weakness and imperfection of the human conditions is, 
and remains, the church's own, evidence of the incom- 
plete subordination of the society on earth to the Lord in 
heaven. The extraordinary thing is, not that the churches 
have so often fatally erred and disastrously failed in duty, 
but that they have been able, in spite of their errors and 
failures, so far to obey the Christ as to render service to 
man. 

2. The churches of to-day have no easy task; never did 
God lay on men harder or graver duties. They inherit 
both the good and the evil, the honour and the reproach 
of the past. If history has its glory, it has also its shame, 
and no history has known brighter glory or darker shame 
than the history of the Church. And if we are proud of 
the glory, we are no less humbled by the shame. We dare 
not rejoice in evil, least of all when done or suffered by 
any member of the body of Christ. I would, were it pos- 
sible, have our churches to feel the failings or sins of their 
sister churches, as if they were their own; and to feel 
concerning their own sins as if they were injuries or wrongs 
to their sisters. For these past, as for all present sins, by 
whatever church committed, we all suffer, whether we will 
or are unwilling; collective are so far like personal sins 
that they weaken our energies, hinder our efforts, create 
the passion or the prejudice that, unmoved, turns away 
from the most persuasive speech. I would have our 
churches to be jealous of nothing in any church save its 



A DIVINE SOCIETY AS PROGRESSIVE 49 

greater goodness and larger truth; to have no ambition 
but the ambition to excel in zeal for God and devotion to 
man. The pride that does not confess fault, does not own 
brotherhood, is deficient alike in ethical character and filial 
spirit. There is no man so much a sinner as the man who 
believes himself altogether a saint, and the church which 
most vaunts itself as infallible is the church which has 
most frequently and deeply fallen. 

3. But to feel the evil of the past is to learn by it, and to 
be the better fitted to live and work in the present. The 
church ought to be the most progressive of all societies, 
foremost in every kind and province of good. Its place is 
not behind but before the times; it ought not to follow, 
but to lead the people and the State. And this obligation 
increases with age. Many Christian ideas have ceased to 
be the exclusive property of the church, and have become 
the common possession of the time ; but in becoming such 
a possession the ideas have simply created the conditions 
that not only allow, but demand from all Christian com- 
munities the exercise of greater and higher activities. The 
more society improves the more possible it becomes for the 
churches to pursue nobler methods, and attempt vaster 
things. If they become mere conservative agencies, anx- 
ious only to maintain things as they are, then they abdi- 
cate their functions, prefer the real they can enjoy to the 
ideal they ought to seek to realize. A church is bound by 
the past only to excel the past, however noble it may have 
been ; to be merely loyal to what has been is to be indiffer- 
ent to what ought to be. It were better to have no history 
than to have even the most splendid if its years are to be 
but a succession of iron bands. 

4. But the churches have not only to face the difficulties 
and responsibilities created by the past; they have also 



50 BURDENS THE PAST CREATES THE PRESENT BEARS. 

to confront those peculiar to the present. They stand in 
relations to living thought and action that cannot but 
touch with concern all interested in the future of religion, 
and society, and man. For these relations are troubled, 
surcharged, indeed, with elements of collision and conflict, 
and he must be at once a blind and a sanguine man who 
neither sees the crisis nor feels the danger it brings. The 
responsibilities of the situation rest with the churches, not 
because they are solely or even mainly responsible for the 
creation of the present, but because they are altogether 
responsible for its issues. It is not enough, in these days, 
that a society has a large inheritance ; it inherits from the 
past that it may the better fulfil its duties in the present, and 
it depends on its stewardship whether the inheritance be 
spared, and the society be honoured. Men's minds are not 
at this moment in a credulous or patient mood ; they are 
critical and sceptical of all traditional beliefs, impatient of 
all conventional sanctities and honorary institutions. 
Yet this is a mood men of real beliefs and institutions of 
approved beneficence will not fear. He but ill understands 
Christianity who thinks that it is most honoured where 
least questioned, or that it has most power where men are 
most credulous. The days when its right to be was most 
sharply challenged were the days when it displayed the 
most victorious energy ; and if the churches now be as 
dutiful, wise, and magnanimous as were the churches then, 
the result will not be different. 



II 

I . Now, I hope it will not be considered too large or too 
ambitious an undertaking, if I attempt from this chair, not 
to discuss, but to speak simply and seriously concerning 



THE RELATION OF RELIGION TO OUR AGE 5 1 

the relation of our Christian Churches and ReHgion to our 
Age. I feel profoundly the responsibility of venturing to 
touch so grave and vast a theme ; I feel still more profoundly 
the responsibility which rests on all Christian men, and 
teachers, and churches. In this matter, then, we do not 
stand alone; all Christian bodies stand together, bound, 
possibly in spite of themselves, into unity, on the one 
hand by loyalty to their Master, on the other by their 
common duties to man. To be a Christian Church is to be 
the greatest of all societies, charged with the highest and 
most honourable of missions: the mission of interpreting 
God to man and of reconciling man to God. A church 
exists for the purposes of God as manifested in Christ, and 
must be judged in relation to those purposes; and by no 
other standard whatever. But if a church loses hold of 
God and of man, it loses hold of its end ; therefore of its very 
right to be. Its truths are eternal, speak to the human 
heart everywhere ; and, if it loses touch of the human heart, 
it is because it has lost possession or comprehension of its 
own truths. And a church void of living truth, bearing 
only dead dogmas in its bosom, what is it good for but to 
be buried out of the sight of man ? 

2. Let us begin, then, by noting this : While our subject 
is Christianity in the present, it cannot be discussed with- 
out reference to Christianity in the past. All really reli- 
gious action, therefore, while done in time, has eternal 
relations and issues ; we build on the past, but in the pres- 
ent and for the future. Our religion is a living thing, its 
history is a growth, the earliest ages live in the latest, 
augmenting their energies, conditioning their behaviour. 
An historical church is not the same thing as an historical 
Christianity; the latest and least historical of churches 
is, possibly, in a greater degree than the oldest, heir to 



52 A CHURCH WHICH WORKS IN THE PRESENT 

all that is historical in the religion of Christ. What be- 
longs either to Catholicism or Romanism is the inalienable 
possession of the Church of Rome ; but what in its history 
has been achieved by the truth and Spirit of Christ is 
the common property of Christendom, the inalienable in- 
heritance of all its churches. There is, then, an historical 
religion, with which the religion of to-day stands organi- 
cally connected, its product, yet not its culmination, a stage 
in the path of the eternal purpose that runs through the 
ages. This is something infinitely nobler than an historical 
church, for religion signifies the action of God within the 
limits and in the forms of time, working in all the churches, 
using the meanest and worst-designed agencies for ends 
far beyond and above themselves. Whatever is created 
by the truth of God and through His Spirit belongs to 
this religion ; for it is but His eternalized action, the fruits 
of the life of God as realized in the spirit of man. It is 
confined to no Church, for the Spirit and the Truth were 
before the churches, and are within and above all. Its 
peculiar home is with the elect of God, the sons of holiness 
and light, who hear His Voice and obey His Will. They 
constitute the only true Catholic Church, invisible, spir- 
itual, eternal; and the monument of their being in time is 
the history of the Christian religion. 



Ill 

Now, it is not possible to exhibit here the significance of 
the successive stages in the life of this historical religion. 
All that is possible is to select one or two salient points 
needed to explain and illustrate the work of religion in our 
own day. 

I. The earliest history is still the richest in instruction 



IS NOBLER THAN AN HISTORIC CHURCH 53 

and inspiration. Of the Apostolic Age there has been 
speech already from this chair; and its lessons were simply 
emphasized by the sub-apostolic. Christianity and the 
Roman Empire were born together, the one at its birth 
the mightiest, the other the feeblest of human things. 
The founder of the Empire was the well-praised Augustus; 
of the religion, the crucified Christ. A century and half 
later, under the Antonines, in what a famed historian* 
has, with unconscious irony, called *'the most happy and 
prosperous" period in history, the religion had its hardest 
struggle. for existence. It was hated with the merciless 
hate the proud and strong have for the low-born and the 
weak ; it was met and confounded by the coarse scorn and 
invincible prejudice of the vulgar and the ignorant; it was 
oppressed and mishandled by the absolute power which 
our famed historian described as ''under the guidance of 
virtue and wisdom " ; it was defamed by the lying malice of 
Judaism; it was mocked by the pitiless satire of Lucian, 
which might well have shamed modest truth into silence; 
it was exposed to the borrowed slanders, superfine criticism, 
and philosophic reasoning of Celsus ; it was confronted and, 
on what seemed its own chosen ground, almost surpassed 
by the stoical calm and ethical elevation of Marcus Aure- 
lius. Yet so vast were the energies the despised faith de- 
veloped in the struggle that in another century and half the 
Roman Emperor was a professed Christian, and the Cross 
the symbol that floated from the Capitol. 

And what were the victorious energies ? Hate was met 
by love — a love that refused to fear the worst the per- 
secutor could do, and refused to hate the persecutor for 
doing his worst. The love thus too strong to die before hate 
became the death of hate, subdued it into forbearance, if not 

* Gibbon, Decline and Fall, ch. iii. 



54 RESPONSE OF EARLY CHURCH 

into gentleness. Coarse scorn was met by gracious minis- 
tries, service of the poor, help of the orphan, comfort of the 
widow, soft tendance of the diseased, sweet consolation of 
the dying. Bonds, imprisonment, and death were an- 
swered by meekness and obedience. Men the law un- 
justly handled, did the law honour by living blameless lives. 
Slander and mockery they met by pureness and sincerity ; 
it was a noble boast of Tertullian's that the Christians 
were the only men condemned without crime and de- 
spised without reproach.* Criticism was answered by 
history and exegesis; philosophical argument by a new 
and nobler philosophy, which placed at the source of 
all things an eternal Father, bound humanity as a son to 
Him by an incarnate Redeemer, and which made all true 
thought and speech of man stand in glorious unity through 
the inspiration of the Holy Ghost. That philosophy 
was no system of abstract truth, fit only for the culti- 
vated ; but a very body of life, making the humblest feel 
as if the very secret of the universe had at last become 
articulate. And men who so believed — however lowly 
born — could live, think, and speak as grandly as Mar- 
cus Aurelius, while acting with a lofty magnanimity and 
large beneficence to which the sainted stoical Emperor 
never attained .f These were the forces that triumphed 
in that wonderful struggle. The victorious energies were 

* There was no nobler or freer spoken apologist among the early Chris- 
tians than Tertullian. He asks, Whether the Christian is committed to 
the flames — a punishment which was not inflicted on the sacrilegious, on 
the public foe, or even on the traitor — for freedom from crime, for his 
polity, for righteousness, for purity, for faithfulness, for truth ? {Ad 
Scapulum, 4), which may be said to be an apology for Christianity 
based on the principle peculiar to the Christians to love those that hate 
them. See all Tertullian's early works ; in particular the Apologeticus 
which contains authentic descriptions of the Early Church. 

■j- See Thomas Gataker's — one of the most learned Grecians England 
can boast, and a member of the Westminster Assembly — edition of the 
Meditationes, and in particular his Prceloquium. 



TO CHARGES OF ANCIENT HEATHENISM 55 

not ecclesiastical, nor were they born of organization, 
marshalled and led by official authorities, but were spir- 
itual, ethical, religious, begotten from above by the truth of 
God in the spirit of man. And the victory won by the 
religion secured for the religion the right to live, to work 
through human energies and under human conditions as 
the divine grace reigning unto righteousness. 

2. With the victory of the religion, what it is the fashion 
to call ' ' the Church " entered on a new phase — the political. 
It took corporate being, and stood first under the State, 
then alongside it, and finally over it.* The causes of this 

* This is the only note which it is proposed to add to this address 
at this point, where almost every sentence requires what shall either con- 
firm or modify or strengthen the thing said. This note is not intended 
for any such purpose, which were alien to the function of the address ; 
but is designed simply to elucidate the historical statement which occurs 
in the above sentence. The Church is said to have stood first under 
the State ; secondly, alongside it ; thirdly, above it — relations that may 
as well be explained, since the term "church" has a different sense in 
each case. The first is the Church which under Constantine so stood 
under the State as to be dependent on it, i.e. he thinks of the new 
religion in the terms of the old, as similarly constituted with similar 
relations to the Empire and Emperor. As Eusebius informs us {C.H. 
X, 5-7, and in the L.C. — et's rbv fSiov rod [xaKaplov KiovaTavrivov — ii, 20—21, 
24, 26, 35-36, 39-40, 44-45, 56; iii, 58, 63-65; iv, 18), a number of 
laws were passed which all implied that the new religion had superseded 
the old. such as that money was now granted to the clergy as it used 
to be to the old priesthood ; temples were pulled down ; churches 
were erected ; the promotion of unity within the Church was held 
to be an imperial function ; so was the calling of synods and other con- 
ciliar bodies ; and it was the business of the Emperor to put down 
heresies and all strange opinions. While Constantine may as man 
have undergone the change we term conversion, yet there was no corre- 
sponding change in his relation as Emperor either to the religion or its 
institutions. The new was as the old ; their relations to him and in 
consequence to the State were the same. The second ideal is different in 
type from the first, because the ideas as to Church and State differ. 
The Roman Empire with its Emperor has disappeared, and in its place 
the German has come. The person who represents the Church as well as 
the State is Charlemagne, and that great ruler has another idea of the 
Church than Constantine had, and consequently of the State. He is a 



56 THE RELIGION OF CHRIST IS GREATER 

change, the need for it, the struggle by the greater of the 
Fathers against its consequences — these and such-like 
things do not here concern us. What we have to note is 
simply this : How and what the religion accomplished under 
these strange and encumbering conditions. It breathed a 
kinder spirit into the State, made the laws less cruel, gentler 
to the weak, more protective of the innocent. The brutal 
games were abolished, law threw a broader shield over 
women and children and helpless infancy, the slave obtained 
new rights, justice grew milder, and the more bestial sins 
were followed by more terrible penalties. And because of 
the life that worked in it the Church grew stronger, as the 
State grew weaker. Rome perished, but Christianity sur- 
vived. In the dissolution of the old order the church alone 
lived, subdued and then absorbed the barbarians, and so 
became the centre round which the new order crystallized. 
The church that organized the new society became by right 
the regnant force, and remained so for centuries. The 
Roman or Latin church did well for Europe in those days ; 
its supremacy was the supremacy of law, though of law as 

more profoundly religious man, who has, as it were, in him more of 
Christianity, and has another notion alike of freedom and of religion. 
We may say, then, that the church now stood, partially by the pressure 
of its own upward ideas, emancipated from the old empire. The third 
form of the relation is that where the Church stands above the State, or, 
as is said in the text, "over it." Here the best expression is given by 
Gregory VII at Canossa, the famous fortress of the Tuscan dynasty, 
where the Emperor Henry IV came as a penitent. While Church and 
State in their respective orders and organizations may be conceived as 
thus related, it must not be imagined that when unity is thought to 
characterize both Church and State, it does so. John of Salisbury had 
advocated the principle ecclesiastica debent esse liberima; in his work on 
the Sacraments (lib. ii, c. 3), Hugo of St. Victor says, while Christ is the 
invisible Head of the Church, the muUitudo fidelium remains the body; 
and the Pope is the vicar of Peter, placed in his seat by God, and so only 
God can judge him. Wycliffe, Hus, Nicolas de Clemangis, Johahn von 
Wesel, and John Wessel, differed also from Rome. 



THAN ALL CHRISTIAN CHURCHES 57 

administered by men who most err when they most claim 
to be above error. Its idea of law was a religious idea, born 
of the belief that God must have an order, and that this order 
must be revealed and realized in the Society that best ex- 
presses His will. Its idea of sin was also a religious idea, 
embodied in many a terrible form the conviction that to 
man the last calamity was to be in conflict with the law and 
nature of God. Its notion of salvation was a religious 
notion, a crude manner of saying that the supreme need 
of man was to be in holy and happy harmony with God's 
will. In allowing birth no legal place within the church, in 
opening its highest places to the ambition of the lowliest 
born, it proclaimed the equality of Christian manhood. 
By its religious houses it declared that religion was the 
supreme thing, that the man most possessed of divine truth 
was the holiest man. By the arts religion cultivated, and 
the cultivation alike of nature and mind thus spread, toil 
was made honourable, art spiritual, industry fostered and 
ennobled. Through the mighty system-builders — men 
like Anselm and Peter the Lombard, Duns Scotus and 
Aquinas — it exalted the search for truth and the life of 
thought, showing by the reverence that was paid him that 
the schoolman was greater than the warrior, wielded a 
vaster and more abiding power. 

Men often say, ''In those days the church ruled mind," 
meaning thus to condemn both ruler and ruled ; but it 
were truer to say, ''Mind ruled the church, and when mind 
ceased to rule the church the church ceased to rule man." 
What it did it did not by virtue of its organization, but in 
spite of it, by virtue of the truth it carried, the spirit that 
dwelt in its nobler sons and distilled through its multi- 
tudinous members into the common life of man. A church 
that owns men so possessed and inspired of largest love as 



58 CHRISTIAN MEN ARE NEEDED 

Bernard and Francis of Assisi, so saintly as Tauler and 
Thomas a Kempis, so compact of faith and imagination 
as Dante and Fra Angehco, is a church that through its 
godly men and its godliness is owned of God. Where 
beautiful saintHness has been realized, divine guidance has 
not been denied. Yet, much as religion did in and through 
the political church, that church did one splendid, though 
negative, service to religion — it proved on the most 
stupendous scale that a political society, though organized 
and administered by the wit of man, can never be the city 
of God . Rome was neither in her imperial nor ecclesiastical 
days a city of saints, crime did not disqualify for office, or 
displace from power; the highest crown came not seldom 
to the greatest and most impenitent sinner. But a system 
that allows rewards to the guilty is no religious system; 
religion may act through it, but it is not a religion. Its 
ecclesiastical worldliness is its own ; though its spirituality 
is of God. As I said before, so I say again, the first belongs 
without dispute to Rome ; the second is the inheritance of 
all the churches. 

3. Against this ideal of religion, and its too faithful 
realization in the organized sacerdotal and political Church, 
a revolt was inevitable. Reason recoiled from the ideal, 
conscience protested against the reality, and the result 
was the Reformation, which fitly came in the days of the 
person Carlyle terms the ''elegant pagan Pope," Leo X. 
That event was no mere reaction against an exhausted 
and tyrannical system; it was a noble and successful 
endeavour to find a more excellent way. By it Christian 
truth got nearer to man, and man nearer to it, and so new 
elements of the religion were relieved not simply for the 
creation of a higher manhood, but also for incorporation 
in a better society. Sin was so terrible a thing that no 



TO REALIZE THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION 59 

man or church could deal with it, only God could ; salva- 
tion was so great a thing that it must be a divine work 
through and through. The more directly God and man 
stood face to face, then the more sovereign, yet paternal, 
God became, and the worthier, the nearer in dignity to 
Deity, grew man. Religion became more spiritual, more a 
matter of the conscience and reason, bringing God into the 
conscience, reconciling the reason with the Eternal. 

And so at the same moment, and by the same act, religion 
became the source at once of order and freedom, nay, free- 
dom was order, because obedience to the law which was re- 
vealed to reason, but interpreted and enforced by conscience. 
Hence came a larger and higher view of life, liberty was nec- 
essary to it, and not simply civil liberty, but religious as well. 
And so there came wars of an altogether new and strange 
sort — not for conquest or patriotism, but for the right to 
worship God as the reason knew Him, and the conscience 
honoured Him, and the heart loved Him. The battle for 
this freedom is not yet ended, though to the long-assured 
victory there is no more needed the noise of the warrior and 
the garment rolled in blood. In gaining it we gain the con- 
dition most necessary to the highest things. Bondage de- 
praves, slaves are proverbial for their vices ; to be his best 
and most virtuous, man must be free. Religion without 
freedom is not religious, no truth of the reason, no concern 
of the conscience, no joy of the heart, no life for the exercise 
and ennoblement of the spirit of man. Till this freedom 
was won reformed Christianity could only develop its 
sterner side; but once the victory was assured, the gentler 
graces came to mix with and soften the severer virtues. And 
so the older Puritan made possible, nay, in process of time 
he became the newer philanthropist, i.e. a man who lived for 
humanity, creating or administering the beneficent agencies 



OO FREEDOM WON AND USED CONDITIONS. 

that lessen human sin, Hghten human sorrow, make the 
earth happier to man, and loveUer before God. 

4. But freedom had not only to be won, it had to be 
used; and the wise use of it does not come by nature. 
It has to be learned ; experience teaches, exercise is edu- 
cation. Reason, free, turned to ask religion, '* What right 
have you to be ? What are you ? and what is necessary to 
your being ?" Hence came the problem of the eighteenth 
century, and the system which is called on its subjective side 
Rationalism, and on the objective Deism. In the history of 
our faith, this system had a function and consequently a 
place. Reason wished to know whether objective truths 
were necessary to religion. Could religion not survive the 
denial of those elements that either transcended or seemed 
to contradict experience ? As these elements denied left 
nothing distinctively Christian, the question rose — might 
it not be possible to construct a religion by a logical or ratio- 
cinative process ? Nay, must not the one so constructed 
be the religion of religions, which underlies all, and is in all 
concealed ; for it is Nature's own creation, the fittest worship 
for the Spirit? On these points the eighteenth century 
made its immense experiment, tried in its shallow way to 
rationalize Christianity, but found that it died in the process ; 
then tried to evoke the religion of nature, but found that it 
would not be evoked, was indeed not there to answer, had 
never existed, and could by no manner of persuasion be made 
to exist. Religion as transcendental was a creation of God, 
due to His action in time, indeed His highest work in and 
through the Spirit. Where history is fullest of God, the 
creative force is mightiest, and the creative result highest. 
And so the Son who declared the Father was needed to per- 
fect religion in humanity. His appearance was its becom- 
ing. It is real only as it is objectively true ; deny its objec- 



man's higher development 6i 

tive truth, and it becomes a dream of heaven to one age, 
but an illusion of sensuous childhood to another, and still 
later a simple lie meant to gladden an otherwise hopeless 
age. Religion to be real must not be built out of the remi- 
niscence or anticipations of a nature struggling Godward ; 
but must descend from God to man, that it may lift man to 
God. The century that made this evident did a needed 
work: showed once for all that the religion which is not 
alive with Deity is for man no living religion. 

5. It is necessary that we think of the Christian religion 
which did a specific work in each age, as living under varied 
forms during those ages, entering in each more completely 
into the life of man, and creating the conditions in him that 
allowed a freer, and higher, and fuller development in it. 
When we so think, we conceive religion, not the church 
which is its mere vehicle, as the great factor of his progress, 
his wealth, virtue, happiness; yet as creating these only 
that it may evolve the energies that shall be creative in a 
still higher degree. The continued progress of man, 
then, depends on the increasing power of his religion, and 
it is only through its past that one can understand its 
present and forecast its future. But to complete our idea 
of its past, it is necessary to remember one thing : its mighti- 
est achievements are not outer, but inner, spiritual, per- 
sonal. And to estimate what it has done we should know 
what it has been to all the individuals who have believed 
and lived by it. Religion guides the course of history 
only as it inspires the lives of men, and it is because the 
Christian religion has done so much for persons that it 
has been so mighty for good to the collective race. An 
analysis of the contributions Christianity has made not 
only to the sum total of human happiness, but to the con- 
ditions necessary to its being, is not possible; simply 



62 DIVINE BENEFICENCE CREATES 

because its most characteristic contributions have been not 
beneficent ideas, laws, institutions, but Hving men, made 
happy themselves, and inspired by an enthusiasm for human 
happiness and good. The persons are indeed possessed by 
the ideas, which they not only embody, but obey ; and so are 
made at once obedient to the laws and creative of the institu- 
tions; but these are the means of man while men them- 
selves are means employed of God . His beneficence creates 
our benevolence, that through it His own high purposes 
may be fulfilled. And consider how potent the Christian 
religion has been in making man into a means for the ends 
of God. It has made man conceive the universe, not as the 
seat of a dark fate, or cold necessity, or impersonal law, 
but as the home of a gracious God, who made and who 
loves all. As Coleridge said in the Ancient Mariner: 

"He prayeth best who loveth best, 
All things both great and small; 
For the dear God who loveth us, 
He made and loveth all." 

It has, too, made the misery of man a pain to God, and so 
its cure the sacred duty of all the godlike ; the happiness of 
man is the joy of God, and so its increase the function of all 
active godliness. It has, besides, deepened, almost cre- 
ated, the sense of sin, and has intensified the sympathy with 
sorrow till it has become almost too painful to bear; but 
only that men may the more hate and avoid sin, the more 
help and relieve sorrow. It has, also, created new virtues, 
sweeter humanities, nobler and wiser philosophies ; which 
have dignified man, surrounding him, however humbly 
placed, with an almost infinite significance; and which 
have exalted conscience, given to reason its most sacred 
rights, and claimed for liberty its cardinal place. 

But the mere analytical handling of the Christian religion 



AND PERFECTS HUMAN BENEVOLENCE 63 

can never disclose its wealth, or show how it has enriched 
the spirit of man, enlarged and perfected his life. To 
see and know these things the religion must be studied, 
not in the abstract, but in the concrete; not in its insti- 
tutions, but in the persons possessed of its living truths. 
Greater than Christian churches are the Christian men, 
who are to be found not in Councils or Synods, not in Col- 
leges of Cardinals or Houses of Convocation, lower and 
higher ; but only in the Society of Christ where He is most 
fitly or fully seen, in the conscience He has pacified and 
purged from its guilt, in the heart He has soothed in its 
sorrow and sweetened into holy resignation, in the char- 
acter He has formed to deeds of nobleness and sacrifice, in 
the spirits for whom He has changed the shadow of death 
into the sunrise of immortality ; in a word , in the men He has 
made friends of their kind, enthusiasts for goodness, truth, 
and freedom. The making of these men, and the conse- 
quent working the works they have accomplished, are the 
supreme achievements of the Christ in History. Through 
them it has been a record of human progress; their lives 
have exhibited the action of God in humanity. The more 
they have multiplied, the humaner has grown the spirit and 
the nobler the ideals of man. And this progress has proved 
that the ideal immanent in the race is one with the ideal 
active in the religion, and the more its activity is mani- 
fested the more apparent becomes the correspondence 
between the two ideals. What the Creator meant man to 
be, man becomes through the religion of Christ, and this 
agreement of idea and fulfilment is explicable only through 
the identity of their source. The religion comes to be 
that the idea involved in the creation might be evolved 
and turned into an ideal realized. 



64 RIGHTS OF CHRISTIANITY LIE IN ITS CAPABILITY. 

IV 

I . Now, this hurried glance at the historical progress and 
action of the Christian Religion brings us directly face to 
face with our proper question — what is its relation to this 
age, what its work in it, and how this work is to be done. It 
is not my purpose to use history as an apology for our re- 
ligion, or vindication of its right to be. Its achievements 
in the centuries behind us can never, taken alone, be an 
adequate reason for claiming for it or conceding to it con- 
trol over the century in which we live. The right of Chris- 
tianity to be must be sought not in its achievements, but 
in its capabilities ; not in what it has done, but in its capabil- 
ity of doing. It must, like force or energy, be a power 
capable of doing work. This, and nothing less, is worthy of 
it ; if it could speak, no smaller plea would it allow to be 
urged in its name. To live by retrospect is at once the 
privilege and the proof of age, seemly where active life is 
over, because evidence alike of what has been and what is. 
To live in deed and endeavour is the sign and duty of man- 
hood ; what alone becomes quick reason and unexhausted 
energies. To have served man constitutes a claim on his 
gratitude ; to be able to serve him even better than he has 
yet been served, constitutes a claim on his faith and obedi- 
ence. And this is the claim that in the face of this nine- 
teenth century we make in behalf of our religion. If it be 
but a monument of past service whose good has all been in- 
corporated in that mighty entity called the Race, I have 
no wish to see it live ; but if it is the home and centre of the 
healthiest, highest, and happiest energies that still work 
in humanity, then it ought to live and affirm its right to 
live, that humanity may be saved. 

Here, then, is our position: Christianity is full of un- 



THE CALL OF THE PAST TO RELIGION 65 

exhausted energies, of latent and undeveloped capabilities, 
fitted to meet the deepest and most clamant wants of the 
day. The development of these energies and capabilities 
has been made possible by the course and progress of the 
past; their exercise is made necessary by the needs of 
the present. These needs Christianity has helped to create, 
in order that by satisfying them it might make man more 
thoroughly and perfectly Christian. In the present I hear 
only a deep call to our religion to be true to itself and do the 
work God sent it to perform ; in the past I see only a slow 
growth into the wisdom and strength that the better quali- 
fies it to respond. From the Church of the Apologists and 
Martyrs we must learn to wed thought to action, to think 
nobly if we are to live bravely and well, to live purely if 
we are to understand our faith, to honour it. and make it 
honoured. The best apology for it is not offensive criti- 
cism; it is construction. We do but poor service if we 
simply demolish a rival system ; but the greatest possible 
service if we add a living stone to the temple of truth. 
From the organized political church we learn that religion 
has to do with everything, and ought to pervade and govern 
the State, penetrate and affect all laws, reach and benefit all 
classes, regulate and inspire all lives ; but we also learn that 
the political ideal will never accomplish this, will accom- 
plish only the very opposite, turn religion into worldliness, 
and make the church the playground of the hungry and the 
ambitious. From the Free Churches we learn that reli- 
gion must be free, a matter of the spirit, impossible with- 
out personal conviction, real only as the conviction is real. 
From the eighteenth century, which we regard as the age of 
apologetics, we learn that the truth of the matter believed 
is necessary to the reality of the belief and its control over 
the life; that to be without knowledge of God is to be 



66 THE fathers' day less complex than ours. 

without religion, and where the knowledge is fullest and 
purest the religion will be most perfect and authoritative^ 
2. But it is not enough to be enriched by the lessons and 
experience of the past; they enrich us only that we may 
the better do our work in the present. Our fathers were in 
many respects greater than we, greater as theologians, 
scholars, ecclesiastics, possibly, too, as men; but in one 
vital respect our day differs from theirs in being more com- 
plex; it has a vaster variety of elements in its life, more 
radical problems in its thought. The questions — reli- 
gious, intellectual, moral, social, political, and ecclesiastical 
— that rise and demand solution, and demand it from 
religion, if religion is to continue to live — exceed in mul- 
titude and in difficulty anything the older and simpler 
times knew or could have conceived. In dealing with these 
questions the most heroic is the wisest way — it ought to 
be shown that the best solution is to be found in religion. 
The religion which comes from God must be able to satisfy 
the whole man ; the complications of the most complex life 
ought not to be too much for it. To be silent about the 
things that most concern man, is to renounce the right to 
lead him. Men cannot help themselves, they simply must 
ask their questions, whether religion answers or no; and 
they will take the best solution they can find, and make of 
it a faith or — a fetish. Religion has the answer, but the 
answer it has must be given through the churches and the 
men who are their interpreters. They stand between 
religion and the age, and have duties to both, and must be 
loyal to both, not sacrificing either to the other, leaving the 
age ignorant of religion or religion dumb and impotent 
before the age. But before a man can interpret religion, 
bring out all its infinite significance for mind and life, he 
must allow religion to take possession of his spirit, so to 



THE PROBLEMS OF THE ZEITGEIST 67 

penetrate and pervade him by its mighty energies and 
truths, that it shall be to him an inspiration and he be for it 
a prophet. If there are men who know both their age and 
their religion, the age and the religion are certain to be 
made to know each other. Give us men who can interpret 
the speech of God, and we shall find it the completest 
answer to the deepest questions of man. 

V 

But from the religion in the past and its problem in the 
present, we must now advance to another point — the 
Attitude of the Age to the Religion. Here it would be easy 
to speak in terms whether hopeful, critical or despondent, 
as to the Zeitgeist, the mind, temper and tendency of the 
times; but it will be better to make the attempt to be 
within our narrow limits analytical and judicial. 

I. It must be confessed that the religious spirit of the 
day is earnest, active, philanthropic, missionary. The 
severest critic, were he also honest and just, could not say 
less. He might say that its zeal was narrow, unenlightened , 
often sectional and bitter, ill-advised as to means, and not 
wise in its ends ; but he could not question its reality. Nor 
can its beneficence be doubted; the philanthropy of to- 
day is, happily, far from altogether religious, but it re- 
mains in the main what it has been. Its springs are in 
the churches; its apostles and ministers are the men they 
make. Missions, too, home and foreign, are abundant; 
it is manifest that all churches are possessed of the belief 
that Christianity is still able to save souls. The evils of 
the times are many, and lie on the surface; any fool can 
see them, and may well be wise enough to reprove them. 
The sects are multitudinous; their spirit is exclusive and 
fierce — nay, even cruel ; yet the passion of intense sin- 



68 PHARISAIC RESPECTABILITY BAD, PHARISAIC 

cerity is a nobler thing than the cynicism of indifference 
or the superfine disdain that can only despise zeal for the 
truth, not understand it. Conventionalism, the worship 
of the established and the customary, the profession that 
is saved from being hypocrisy only by being innocently 
unconscious of any reality to be professed — these, and 
such like, are shameful, as all shams are; but there is 
something worse than Pharisaic respectability. There 
is Pharisaic vice, guiltiness avowed and ostentatious. 
Manners that are only manners, and not ways and modes 
of a noble spirit, are poor things; but at the worst good 
manners must always be better than bad. There are 
sins enough of religious men and communities to reprove ; 
unveracities, infidelities, uncharitableness, jealousy of 
another's good, glorying in another's evil, devotion to 
the knight-errantries rather than to the patient and fruit- 
ful husbandries of beneficence; but the man who thinks 
and speaks of these as if they were the heart and whole of 
living religion, is like a man who should declare he could 
not see the sun for his spots, or who should mistake the nod 
of Homer for the measure and movement of his verse. 

2. In spite of its sins and shortcomings, the religious life 
of to-day is strong and good, full of purpose and high en- 
deavour. On the practical side especially, it is worthy of 
praise. Imagine a Roman, who in the first century had 
watched the beginnings of Christianity, come back to see 
how it looked and lived in the nineteenth: a Tacitus, 
let us say, because he had a pen that could bite even in 
describing what he saw. He brings his strong moral 
sense, his hatred of lying and deceit, his scorn for the pomp 
that clothed, but could not hide, the mean and treacher- 
ous soul, his insight into men and movements, his desire, 
not simply to describe events, but to know their causes. 



VICE worse: supposed MORALIZINGS of TACITUS 69 

He finds that to him the savage is more intelligible than 
the civilized ; the jnodern English harder to understand 
than the ancient Germans; but, by-and-by, to his observ- 
ant eye and analytic intellect and clear judgment, things 
become lucid, ordered, explicable; though to find their 
causes he has had to traverse the eighteen centuries that 
divide his own day from ours. And we may conceive him 
speaking somewhat thus : 

''Events do not always verify the judgment of the 
historian, and the man nearest to a thing may, even though 
he claims to be an historian, understand it least. Pos- 
terity, if I may so describe this terrible English people, 
has accepted my reading of the imperial history, and 
judges the emperors, — their crimes, their follies, their 
arbitrary violence, their frightful ingratitude, — very much 
as I have taught it. Men see, too, that I read the meaning 
of those Germans rightly ; if the Romans had only learned 
the lesson, the history of the world might have been so 
different! But in one thing I committed a tremendous 
mistake. I do not see how I could have judged otherwise, 
yet history has been one immense falsification of my judg- 
ment. I thought the religion of Christ an execrable, a 
''detestable superstition"; and now I find it the religion 
of the civilized world, a world that is more civilized than 
our own, and it is the cause of the peculiar civilization. 
The moral purity of the religion is extraordinary. These 
churches are not like our temples; their worship is not 
made an occasion of lust and a cloak for sin ; they are the 
best schools of morals, men are made good in them, taught 
to be just and free citizens, to live benevolent and benefi- 
cent lives. Indeed, this religion and these churches seem 
to be the moral heart of this people, the source and spring 
of all their good. What is so unlike our old Roman life 



70 ANCIENT ROME AND MODERN ENGLAND. 

and ways as to be unintelligible to me only becomes in- 
telligible when looked at through this religion. These 
English think of foreign peoples as we never did — as 
men, as brothers, as persons they would like to believe 
and live as they do; to be rich and cultivated as they are. 
Possessing within themselves every good men need desire, 
they yet send out men to teach their God to the veriest 
savages. Our gods were our own, as was our religion ; but 
this God and religion for everybody has created a sense of 
human brotherhood and made all men feel brothers. Then, 
here, I miss our Roman games : the gladiator is unknown ; 
men do not fight with wild beasts, or with each other, unto 
wounds and even death, for the public amusement and at 
the public expense. On the contrary, statesmen do not 
amuse people; they instruct them, build schools and 
colleges, create universities, libraries, galleries, appeal 
to reason, and rule by help of the reason to which they 
appeal. Here, too, I perceive the influence of the religion; 
its spirit of gentleness will not allow men to feel amused 
with blood and death ; and its spirit of humanity makes it 
so respect and regard men that it wishes no man to be killed, 
and every man to be taught. Then, too, there are no slaves 
here ; man is free. The proudest noble, the mightiest sena- 
tor, the very sovereign, dare not lay violent hands on any 
one, or, like our patricians, throw their servants to feed 
their lampreys. Law is queen, and all men are equal before 
it; and all, save the lawless and criminal, are by it made 
free. Here, too, the religion has been at work; where men 
become brothers they can be slaves no more. War, I find, 
is still common; has even become far more terrible in its 
implements and scale of destruction, though this makes it 
less frequent and wasteful of life. Yet here even the same 
beneficent spirit has been active; the victors do not kill 



WHY THEY DIFFER IN PHILANTHROPY 7 1 

their captives, or sell them into slavery; they protect 
them rather; enemies respect each other's dead, and agree 
to help the wounded without respect of persons or armies. 
Indeed, the benevolence of this modern world surprises 
me; the spirit of philanthropy seems universal. We ex- 
posed our children, thankful to have so simple and efficient 
a means of practising domestic economy ; here they build 
hospitals for the foundling and the outcast. We thought 
life a burden to be borne only so long as agreeable; but 
here they hold suicide a sin, connivance at it a crime; suf- 
fering they seek to soothe, weakness to nurse, building 
for those too poor to command comfort those places called 
infirmaries, where skilled men and ministering women wait 
to serve the sick and heal the diseased. It is altogether 
wonderful to me, and would be unintelligible were it not 
for this religion which I once so much despised. It has 
worked so extraordinary a change in human nature that it 
hardly seems the nature of the same humanity. This is 
indeed a thing above nature, as we understood it, above even 
the gods, as we understood them. A God higher than our 
highest must, through this ''detestable superstition," as I 
deemed it, have entered into manhood that He might 
do, what He evidently is doing, make an altogether new 
mankind."* 

VI 

But for us the standard of comparison is not Rome in 
the Tiberian or Neronian age ; it is the ideal of our religion. 
That is an easy virtue which is satisfied with excelling the 
past; that virtue alone is brave which judges itself by 

* If one wants to know what Tacitus thought of this "exitiabilis," this 
fatal or deadly " superstitio," one must read his own words as written in 
the Annals, xv, 44. 



72 ATTITUDE OF THE CULTIVATED TO RELIGION. 

perfection, and is, by the judgment, braced to attempt 
better things. The overheard reflections of a Roman, 
suddenly confronting a world he imperfectly understands, 
might easily become a soothing and delusive song — a fatal 
thing to men whose warfare is not accomplished ; hardly, 
indeed, well begun. So we must look at our age with our 
own eyes, and compare it not with what was in a distant 
past, but with what ought to have been; and, were we 
allowed to speak of possibilities, with what would have 
been had the churches been equal to the religion of Christ. 
The whole field is far too immense to be here surveyed, 
and so we must confine our attention to one or two points 
of primary significance. 

I. There is the attitude of the cultivated and intellec- 
tual classes to the Christian religion. I will not say that 
it moves me either to alarm or despondency; but it does 
fill me with anxious sympathy and concern. It were a 
mistake to imagine that these classes are, either as a body 
or as regards their larger proportion, estranged from Chris- 
tianity. They are not. We cannot forget — it would be 
wrong if we did — that the two greatest living names in 
English literature are the names of poets conspicuous, not 
simply for their reverence, but for their service to religion ; 
and so long as Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning live, 
it dare not be said that either the intellect or the culture 
of England has broken with faith. And they do not stand 
alone. A great number of the most eminent men in science, 
in philosophy, in letters, in art, and in education are men 
distinguished by the most sincere and simple-minded 
piety. But many are deeply and frankly estranged. Some 
are known mainly because of the candid way in which they 
have declared their estrangement ; others have made them- 
selves famous by the skill with which they have used their 



A DUMB GOD AND A PUZZLED MAN 73 

science, or criticism, or art to discredit religion. To name 
names were invidious ; the tendency — which was more 
common in the eighteenth than even in the nineteenth 
century — is still too common a characteristic of our day 
to call for detail. The most distinctive and authorita- 
tive English philosophy is an Agnosticism which, on the 
most favourable interpretation of it, makes God dumb; 
and leaves man standing before Him a puzzled, perplexed, 
and unsatisfied inquirer. The two leading scientific doc- 
trines, the Correlation of the Physical Forces and Evolu- 
tion, have been used as forms and occasions of polemic 
against theism by certain persons who are among, if not 
the most eminent, yet the most widely known, whether 
physicists or naturalists. Literary criticism has been 
made the vehicle of a most unbelieving and often cynical 
spirit ; through the men and systems of the past, the men 
and faith of the present have been most cunningly as- 
sailed. Art in becoming pre-Raphaelite is tending to 
become monotonous and unspiritual; its idealism but 
sensuous sentiment ; its realism, sickly passion ; its classi- 
cism, emasculated imitation, most false, where it ought to 
be most true. They say, "Art has no concern with moral- 
ity," but they forget while admiring the fine naturalism of 
classical art, to remember the noble morality of the men 
that made the art classical. And so our modern aestheti- 
cism which is but pseudo-classicism, knows not how to be 
sacred and spiritual, but only how to be profane and sen- 
suous; when it essays to depict the holiest persons and 
scenes, it but pains by its gross and grotesque realism. All 
this indicates, I will not say the disaffection of the culti- 
vated spirit to Christ, but certainly widespread estrange- 
ment. Society approves what it could not bear were it sen- 
sitive in conscience and reverent in heart. The atmosphere 



74 WHAT CHRISTIANITY OWES TO INTELLECT. 

around it is becoming less favourable to belief; religion is 
losing its old sanctity, because without its old supremacy. 
The society where a man becomes rather more of a favour- 
ite and a hero for his aggressive belligerency or finely-salted 
satire against religion can hardly be called a religious 
society. And who will say that it is otherwise with what 
is esteemed the cultivated society of England ? ^ 

2. This state of matters occasions me, I have said, grave 
concern ; yet less concern than regret. I care little indeed 
about frivolous fashion; it will always come and go ac- 
cording to the ruling spirit of the time, and its religion 
or irreligion will be a very small matter. But I do deeply 
care for what it may indicate, the lapse of noble and com- 
manding spirits from the Christian faith. The loss of such 
spirits is to be altogether regretted. The men and the faith 
alike suffer; it would ennoble them, they would adorn it, 
and increase immensely its power for good. There are men 
now living concerning whom, were the wish of Paul ever a 
becoming or a holy wish, it might be allowed to say, "For 
their sakes I could wish myself accursed from Christ."* 
To trace their unbelief to pride of intellect, or to any save 
an honourable cause, is to do them grievous wrong. 

Yet there they stand, estranged in intellect and conscience 
from the faith of the centuries. And how are they to be 
reconciled? The how, indeed, is as hard to find as the 
need of reconciliation is obvious. No religion can afford 
to lose choice spirits, least of all can the Christian. It has 
done too much for them, owes too much to them ; they are 
too able to serve it to be spared. In the past it has enlisted 
and made them, as it were, its van and rear-guard. The 
great minds of the Christian centuries have been Christian 
minds. When the religion began its aggressive course, 

* Rom. ix. 3. 



INTELLECT OF AGES ON THE SIDE OF RELIGION 75 

each side could claim noble intellects ; on the heathen side 
stood Seneca, Plutarch, Epictetus, Tacitus, Pliny, Juve- 
nal; on the Christian, Peter, Paul, John, and their fellow- 
workers. So far as mere trained intellect is concerned, 
Heathenism is an easy first, but not in the influence that 
shaped later generations. Here either Paul or John over- 
topped all who stood against them; and the balance has 
never been so even since; for it turned swiftly and bent 
deeply to the religion, and has inclined to it till now. In 
the second century Marcus Aurelius, Lucian, and Celsus 
were, to say the least, outweighed by Clement, Poly carp, 
Ignatius, Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus. In the third cen- 
tury, the ascetic and speculative genius of Plotinus and the 
critical intellect of Porphyry touched with sunset glory 
the eventide of paganism; but the brightening dawn 
of the Christian day was proclaimed by the eloquence of 
Tertullian, the learning of Origen, the statesmanship of 
Cyprian. In the fourth century intellect had deserted 
the old religions ; Julian, Libanius, and their host of obscure 
rhetors but form a background that throws into the more 
marvellous brilliancy the galaxy of contemporary fathers, 
men like Athanasius, Eusebius, Basil, the Gregories, 
Chrysostom, Ambrose, Lactantius, Jerome, Augustine. 
These were the men of the century ; their presence on the 
Christian side proved the hopelessness of Julian's apostacy ; 
to the faith they represented imperial edicts were but the 
sound and fury that signify nothing. From that hour to 
this intellect has been Christian; we have but to cite to 
prove it names as typical of mediaeval genius as those of 
Anselm and Abelard, Peter the Lombard and Albert the 
Great, Aquinas and Duns Scotus ; or as representative of 
the sixteenth century, as those of Erasmus and Luther, 
Reuchlin and Calvin, Melanchthon and More, Cranmer 



76 LEIBNITZ, BUTLER, AND KANT WORTH MANY 

and Le Fevre; or of the seventeenth, as Shakespeare and 
Milton, Cromwell and Hampden, Gustavus Adolphus and 
Jacob Boehme. Even the century that might seem the 
great exception to our thesis, the eighteenth, was none, for 
while the men who made most noise in their own day were 
infidel, the men who exercised the deepest and most abid- 
ing influence were not . No man was so feared , read , spoken 
about as Voltaire : but who reads or cares about him to-day? 
At the opening of the century stands Leibnitz, at its middle 
B utler , at its close Kant , and were there three mightier names 
in it, or names fuller of living and quickening spirit ? 

Christianity has, then, a sort of hereditary claim on 
the foremost intellects of time, owes to them gratitude, 
feels for them love. They have served her, have helped 
her to serve man, been the chosen vehicles of her profound- 
est and most plastic influences. And living intellect 
needs the religion ; it is full of disquiet, of yearnings after 
the Infinite it derides. Its cynicism, its scorn, its bitter 
humour, its irony, are all born of discontent. Its art is 
the very apotheosis of sadness, of sensuous desire too indo- 
lent and weary to be honest passion. Its characteristic 
philosophy becomes progressively sadder; in Mr. Her- 
bert Spencer's First Principles there is a glow as of 
religious enthusiasm; in the Principles of Sociology 
only a wearisome analysis of matters that never existed 
in the realms of history and of mind. The men who have 
broken with faith feel in their best moments sadder, almost 
inclined to turn back into their yesterdays in search of the 
faith and hope they have lost. One who comes of a noble 
spiritual stock, whose delicate raillery of the English 
Philistine — the man over-zealous in religion — is but in- 
verted admiration of the Puritan, has allowed us to hear 
"the eternal note of sadness" that comes to him as on 



VOLT AIRES. MATTHEW ARNOLD'S SEA OF FAITH 77 

Dover beach he looks at the calm sea, watches the full tide 
and the moon that "lies fair upon the Straits," and thinks, 

''The Sea of Faith 
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore 
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd. 
But now I only hear 
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, 
Retreating, to the breath 
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear 
And naked shingles of the world." 

The heart as well as the imagination speaks there ; that 
is poetry touched with emotion, the sorrow that comes 
of a loss too great to be repaired by any gain. In its deep 
and growing sadness, the cultivated spirit seems to ask — 
who will show us a force strong enough to draw the tide 
from its ebb to the full that it may clothe the naked shore 
and throw its soft yet sheltering embrace round our hearts 
and lives? 

3. But a matter of even greater concern is the attitude 
of the industrial and labouring classes to religion. Their 
attitude becomes to me the gravest of all reproaches to 
the churches of England, the most significant example of 
misunderstood duties and neglected responsibilities. Our 
religion was born in poverty ; its sympathies and associa- 
tions were with the poor. The Master laboured with His 
own hands, and the ''common people heard Him gladly." 
Its apostles were workmen; it drew its earliest recruits 
from the men who toiled. The change it worked in the 
world was accomplished from below, through the elevation 
of the masses, not by the action of kings. But what marks 
the religion of our day is the loss of the masses. Their es- 
trangement is more general and, I will add, more deplo- 
rable than that of the cultivated, for the Churches are 
more directly responsible for it. Yet not all in an equal 



78 THE INDUSTRIAL CLASSES AND RELIGION. 

degree. The Church of Rome, at least in the British Isles, 
holds its poor; and the Methodists have in certain of our 
districts and among certain classes achieved wonders. But, 
taken throughout, the English working-man has too largely 
ceased either to go to church or to be a religious person in 
any tolerable sense. He seldom attends church or chapel ; 
he does not admire, often cordially despises, the parson; 
he thinks religion helps him but little in the struggle for 
life; he thinks it hinders him rather, being mostly on 
the side of privilege and capital. He may not be a pro- 
nounced secularist, but he strongly believes that a religion 
which is not good for this life cannot be good for the next ; 
that what is not openly and strongly for justice and freedom 
and against oppression cannot be of God and the truth. 
His battle for his rights and liberties has been mainly his 
own; and, while many of the men who have helped him 
have been loudly anti-Christian, too few Christian men 
have dared to apply religion to his problems and his con- 
flicts. Everything has encouraged the tendency of mind 
thus begotten: the rapid growth of large cities has been 
fatal to simplicity of life and mind, the action of the im- 
mense factories and workshops has been to create monot- 
onous uniformity, to repress individuality, to prevent or 
blight the culture of the home. Amusements have been 
too much left to the tavern, houses have been so built as 
to make comfort, at times even decency, hardly possible; 
and for long education was too rare and too poor to leave 
the mind anything but an uncultivated blank, or, at best, 
a congenial home for weeds. But, whatever the causes, 
there the fact stands, a large proportion of our working 
and labouring classes are either indifferent to religion or 
opposed to it. I dare not venture on the percentages, 
they are so immense as to seem simply incredible ; but what- 



WHAT THEIR ALIENATION SIGNIFIES 79 

ever they are, they ought to call the churches to earnest 
searchings of heart for past neglect and strenuous attempts 
at present duty. 

To attempt to speak one's regret were vain; it is too 
deep for speech. The typical English workman has many 
noble qualities, he is plain-spoken, straightforward, in the 
best sense veracious, with an innate love of justice that 
makes him almost by nature the friend of the wronged and 
downtrodden. He is not like the gifted youth of the clubs, 
sceptical of all good, airily indifferent to truth, cynical to 
men who have convictions, scornful of sincerity or enthu- 
siasm as of a thing "in bad form" ; but he is a convinced 
man, with beliefs he holds strongly and states roundly; 
certain, whatever his theology, that a man ought to stand 
by the truth, that a mean man can come to no good, that 
principle ought to rule and justice be impartial. To leave 
such natures unpenetrated by religion is to do them griev- 
ous wrong ; it is to leave without its best blessing the land 
that owns them. To possess her sons of industry, to make 
of them the best possible — that, and nothing less, ought 
to be the ambition of every church in England. 

VII 

What, then, ought to be the attitude and behaviour of 
our religion, or rather the churches which represent and 
interpret it, in the face of these features and tendencies of 
our age ? We shall attempt to deal with the question as it 
relates first to the cultivated, and next, to the industrial 
classes. 

I 

I. The attitude of the cultivated, with all its various 
phenomena, social, literary, ethical, aesthetic, is the expres- 



8o THE MODERN TEMPER IS HEATHEN. 

sion of a broad and strong intellectual movement or 
tendency, what we may call a heathen revival. The terms 
are not used to convey reproach, but simply to characterize 
and distinguish. The endeavour, sometimes conscious, 
oftener unconscious, is to get behind Christ, and take up 
the development of man at the point where He touched it 
and turned it into His own channels. The tendency is not 
specifically Greek or Roman, but broadly heathen ; it seeks 
less to realize the forms of a departed age than to recover 
the basis of its thought and life. Its characteristic is 
Naturalism, the expulsion from thought, not merely of the 
supernatural, but of the ideal, of the transcendental and 
spiritual, and the return to a nature sensuously interpreted. 
This Naturalism is so marked as to constitute the differen- 
tiating element of our intellectual movement. The thought 
of the Christian centuries, even where it has been least 
Christian, has still been penetrated by ideal and theistic 
elements. Theism has been, as it were, its common basis. 
The Renaissance was a classical, but it was not a heathen, 
revival. The guiding genius was ideal, Plato and the 
poets, and these as, if not baptized into Christ, yet as 
prophetic and supplemental of Him. The return was not 
to heathenism, but to the idealism that had laboured to 
transcend it. In the Middle Ages, as in the sixteenth and 
seventeenth centuries, individual thinkers strove to rise 
from the current dualism to a higher and more rational 
unity ; but these efforts were, as Spinoza's was, pantheistic, 
and made thought either the ultimate reality or an attribute 
coordinate with extension. In the last century the move- 
ment away from Christ was towards deism, a system which 
gave God singularly little to do, left Him Creator, but re- 
lieved Him from the labours and cares of Providence. 
Still, though more zealous for His being than His action. 



HEATHENISM — A REVIVAL OF SPENT FORCES 8l 

Deism retained God for thought, and made duty to Him a 
necessary part of a reasonable and perfect Hfe. But the 
intellectual movement of to-day is impatient of God, will 
have no nature that contains any trace of Him, only a nature 
charged with force sufficient to do all its own work. If it 
cannot escape the idea of cause, it will speak of it as matter 
or force, or even the unknown, not as reason, or will, or God. 
If it finds a purpose, marked by an extraordinary series of 
ascending creations, running through the history alike of 
the earth and man, it will speak of it in the terms of evolu- 
tion, which, it sagely observes, has abolished at once the 
idea and the evidences of design, not perceiving that it has 
only substituted an immenser and more transcendent 
teleology. The quest of the modern intellect is for a 
nature without God; where it can do without Him it 
speaks in the language of constructive science; where 
it cannot, it uses the speech of agnosticism, and delivers 
unctuous homilies on the modesty and excellence of igno- 
rance. And so the only nature it will have is the nature of 
the senses, and hence its naturalism is material and sensu- 
ous. It will have neither the idealism nor the deity of 
Plato, neither the reason nor the ideal end of Aristotle ; but 
only the atoms of Democritus, the senses and the pleasures 
of Epicurus. The heathenism it revives is not spontaneous 
and primitive, like Homer's, where Nature is alive with the 
gods, and holds in her bosom, unsolved and unevolved, the 
problems and the germs of all the philosophies; but it is 
decadent and exhausted, the heathenism of Lucretius 
and the Sceptics, without any gods, without the imagina- 
tion to which Nature was but the history and parable 
of Deity. Such a revival is a revival of spent forces, 
that can gather only for an early and more complete 
dispersion. 



82 LUCRETIUS REVIVED IN THE 

2. The parallel implied in these last sentences is not inci- 
dental ; it is material and designed. The intellectual basis 
of modern is essentially akin to the intellectual basis of an- 
cient thought before it was confronted and supplanted by 
the Christian religion. This affinity might be exhibited in 
detail, but time is too inexorable to allow more than a few 
illustrative points. Lucretius, for example, might be reck- 
oned almost as much a thinker of the nineteenth century as 
of his own ; his poem is as to form Latin, but, as to sub- 
stance, it belongs to the school of modern English physical 
metaphysics. Like a true son of the school, he has un- 
bounded contempt for all without it, unbounded admira- 
tion for all within it. The older superstitions have weighed 
down life and trodden upon man, but when the Grains Homo, 
the man of Greece, his master, Epicurus, rose, all was light ; 
he passed the flaming walls of the world, traversed in 
thought the immeasurable universe, and returned a con- 
queror, to tell us what can and what cannot come into 
being. "Divine genius," a man of ''God-like heart," may 
be the highest term he uses, but we have heard effusive 
scientists among us speak in almost identical terms of a 
late distinguished naturalist, or of the distinguished living 
explorer of the unknown and interpreter of the unknow- 
able. Then his world is a world without design, atoms 
— the rerum primordia * — are the unmade makers of all 
things; driven by mechanical necessity, they have been 
at work during infinite time past, have collided, cohered, 
combined, dissolved, tried every kind of combination, till, 
at length, they have laboured out the goodly nature we 
see, causing "the streams to replenish the greedy sea 
with copious ri ver- waters ; and the earth, fostered by the 
heat of the sun, to renew its produce, and the race of living 

* i. 55. 



SPECULATIONS OF MODERN SCIENCE 83 

things to come up and flourish, and the ghding fires of 
ether to live."* Earth has gotten the name of mother, 
since she produced all living creatures ; many phenomena 
even now take form from rains and the heat of the sun. 
Beyond this modern scientific speculation can hardly 
be said to have passed. And religion, how did it come 
to be ? By sleep and dreams and death, aided by thunder 
and earthquakes and other dread phenomena of nature, 
giving the idea of invisible beings, of mighty and many- 
limbed gods, unfriendly and terrible to man.f Were 
it not for the archaic Latin form, we might almost imagine 
we were here reading a condensed but elegant poetic ver- 
sion of the first part of Mr. Herbert Spencer's Principles 
of Sociology. Yet Lucretius would not banish faith or 
forbid worship ; nay, if a man thinks right to call the sea 
Neptune, corn Ceres, and earth the mother of the gods, 
he is free to do it, '* if he only forbear in earnest to stain his 
mind with foul religion. "J And in his own splendid 
invocation to Alma Venus, hominum divomque Voluptas,^ 
he shows us how one who has denied the gods can yet use 
their speech and call for help upon ''the sole mistress of all 
things, without whom nothing rises up into the divine 
borders of light, nothing grows to be glad or lovely." And 
have we not heard that the new religion is to be the wor- 
ship of the universe ; that the voice of science is the voice 
of the only God that now lives? Said Goethe, *'He 
who has science and art has also religion," || and so say 
they all. And Mr. Herbert Spencer considerately resolves 

* i, 1030-1034. f V, 1 161 ff. I i, 100. 

§ i, 1-43. ii, 581 ff; cf. in particular, 658. After he has spoken about 
earth as magna deum mater, what he says as to certain veteres Gracium 
docti, 600 ff, has to be noted. The lines specially quoted are 653-9. 

11 See especially Eckermann, "Gesprache mit Goethe.^' He says in 
Part I (1868) that religion stands in precisely the same relation to art as 



84 REACTION STRONG TO-DAY IN BOTH 

all religious beliefs into "modes of the manifestation 
of the Unknowable," and so he exhorts each man to 
regard himself **as one of the myriad agencies through 
whom works the unknown cause,"* and his beliefs as 
beliefs it has produced that he may profess. What more 
or better could Lucretius himself have said when he im- 
plored the Venus, who for him personified the fructifying 
forces of earth, to ''give to his lays an everlasting charm" ? 

3. It is impossible to pursue the parallel, though it could 
be made most complete, illustrative of all that is most 
modern in the way of conceiving religion, of handling re- 
ligious history, of criticizing religious thought, and of repre- 
senting and describing religious life. Yet enough has been 
said to enable us to emphasize one point — the thought 
most opposed to Christianity is ancient, and belongs to a 
decadent period, a period of philosophical feebleness, when 
the great thinkers of antiquity had ceased to reign because 
they had ceased to be understood. The strength of the 
modern movement is thus the strength of reaction, not of 
progress; to speak in the language of Evolution, it is ah 
instance of a reversion to an earlier type, not the develop- 
ment of a new and higher. 

There is nothing older than the newer objections to 

any other supreme material for living. Yet he confesses that, as he draws 
near death, he thinks of the spirit as indestructible, and active from ever- 
lasting to everlasting. He compares the Mohammedan religion with the 
Christian, to the advantage of the latter, especially as regards its doctrine 
of Providence, which he finds expressed in "the hairs of your head are 
numbered," and "a sparrow does not fall to the ground without the will 
of your Father." He saw some good in the doctrine of grace ; and the 
Pentateuch he loved as the work of Moses. He thought that the Christian 
was the only perfect morality ; and that the longer man lived the more 
Christian was he destined to become, especially as the religion was less a 
thing of worship and more of feeling and action. These things are said 
to relieve Goethe from the blame the position of the text would assume. 
* First Principles, p. 123. 



MONSIEUR RENAN AND MR. MATTHEW ARNOLD 85 

Christianity; they are as ancient as the eadiest literary 
criticism of the religion. M. Renan is a sort of Celsus 
redivivMS, while Mr. Matthew Arnold is a kind of modern- 
ized Lucian, though with better manners, more religion, 
and a higher mind . Celsus may be said to be an ancient yet 
a modern who has his living representatives. Men say two 
things : (a) Miracles are impossible, ** as the order of nature 
is an order which cannot be broken." And Christianity, 
therefore, as essentially miraculous, is necessarily false. (/3) 
For it implies that "God has so badly arranged matters that 
He needs to interfere with His own order on behalf of man," 
which is an idea quite unworthy of an Infinite Intelligence. 
Now let us hear Celsus : {a) As to the belief in the mirac- 
ulous, he satirizes the Christian for saying: ''Jesus is the 
Son of God because He healed the lame and the blind," 
and He also ''raised the dead." {fi) He holds that "the 
world is not made for man any more than for the dolphin 
or the eagle: it is made solely to be a work of God, com- 
plete in itself, and in all its parts ; all things within it have 
reference to each other only so far as they bear upon the 
whole. God cares for it . . . and He is angry at men 
as little as He is angry at apes and flies." (7) He says: 
"Christians are like a lot of frogs or worms holding a coun- 
cil in the mud, and debating the question, which of them 
is the greatest sinner, yet only that they may the more 
proudly say, God is, and we are next-of-kin to Him, like 
to Him in all things ; all things are for our sakes ; though 
we have sinned, God has sent His Son to save us and burn 
up the wicked." What better, save in politeness — for 
no writer has now the excuse which Celsus had, that Jesus 
was an upstart and Christianity a thing of yesterday — is 
the modern satire of the Christian idea? M. Renan 's 
natural history of the belief in the resurrection is well known ; 



S6 CELSUS AND THE MODERNS ON THE RESURRECTION. 

a possessed woman, once the home of seven devils, unable to 
yield her Lord to death, fancies she sees Him, then believes 
it, and proclaims her belief till all receive it.* The theory 
is in Celsus; a fanatical woman, and a band of credulous 
men explain the whole matter .f In other points the affin- 
ity is rather with Matthew Arnold. J Celsus has a defence 
of national religions against the aggressive universalism of 
Christianity, and so remarkable is it that a too hasty 
translation might almost make it look like an unrevised 
version of Mr. Arnold's apology for the Anglican establish- 
ment. We are too prosaic to dare an excursion into those 
realms of imagination, wit, satire, and sweet reasonable- 
ness where our modern critic has his agreeable home. Mr. 
Arnold is a man of inimitable gravity; but it is possible 
to take the gravest man too gravely. It has been the sin 
of the Philistines to be too serious to be understood of 
him, and they have had to expiate their sin by under- 
standing him too seriously. And so it may be the part of 
wisdom simply to say, ''The stream of tendency that 
makes for righteousness" is as old as Buddha; and the 
reduction of religion to conduct, or ** morality touched by 
emotion," is as ancient as Stoicism. 

4. But within all this similarity there are significant dif- 
ferences. The modern is more reverent than the ancient 
thinker; his spirit is sadder, humaner, more possessed of 
the enthusiasm of humanity, with a deeper sense alike of 

* Les Apotres, pp. 6-18. (Ed. 1866.) 

f The reference is to the Contra Celsum, lib. ii, cc. 57 ff. All other 
quotations have been verified, and may here be specified : (a) is from 
ii, cc. 48 fE; (^) from iv, 99; (7) from iv, 23, The latter is somewhat 
adapted. 

+ There is no point where the rebuke of Celsus by Origen is more 
perfect or better deserved, or the agreement of Celsus with Mr. Arnold 
is more complete, than in the doctrine of conversion, which Celsus saw to 
be incompatible with his idea of a national religion ; lib. iii, cc. 65 ff. 



MIND TO-DAY SEEKS A RELIGION 87 

the necessity of religion and its capabilities for good . These 
are the Christian elements in the modern intellect; of 
them it has not been able, if it had been able it would not 
have been willing, to make a complete renunciation. 
.Christianity has so made the mind of man new that it can 
never again become exactly the old mind. Just look at 
the most characteristic of the moderns : every man of them 
is struggling towards a religion, is endeavouring to create 
one, to place his personal faith, new reasoned and intel- 
lectual, over against the historical faith, which has the 
glory, but also the burden of the centuries. Not every one 
has had the courage with Comte to institute a hierarchy 
and order of worship, to make a calendar of the saints of 
humanity, to use the living mother, wife, and daughter to 
dispossess the ancient Virgin, and to substitute le grand 
Eire, collective man, for God; but not any one has had 
the courage to abandon all religion, or dismiss it in the 
hot words of Lucretius. The last words of Strauss were 
those in which he sketched the religion that was to be, 
the worship of the universe, the order that, while physical 
and necessary, was still benevolent and moral. M. Renan 
passed those miserable months when gay and brilliant 
Paris lay within the iron circle of the German armies in 
speculating as to how best humanity was to create Deity, 
or, as he phrased it, ** organize God." That was to be the 
sum of its achievements, the symbol that its course was 
complete ; Evolution will have done its perfect work when 
mankind has developed Deity. The philosopher of pessi- 
mism has found out that, though it is impossible to worship 
the cause of so miserable a world, it is necessary to worship 
something — the religion of the spirit is needful to alleviate 
the miseries of the flesh. But it is needless to complete the 
catalogue ; all witness to the same thing ; man cannot 



88 THE MAJESTIC THOUGHT OF GOD. 

live without religion, he must have one, whatever its 
kind. And two quaHties, reverence and humanity, it 
must have; must, on the one hand, at once quicken and 
satisfy man's yearning after the perfect and the perma- 
nent; and, on the other, gladden his life, soften his sor- 
rows, govern his affections, purify his sympathies, direct 
and regulate his energies in behalf of all mankind. The 
modern mind feels a reverence the ancient never knew; 
the new religions burn with a humanity the old never 
possessed. And these things are the work of Christ; He 
has made the thought of God so majestic, yet so benign, 
that man never feels but awed in its presence ; and the love 
of man so needful to a perfect manhood and to the perfect- 
ing of mankind, that no sane soul can forget its being or 
ignore its claims. 



VIII 

I . Now this analysis of the characteristics and elements 
of the modern intellectual movement, so far at least as 
its set is away from or against Christianity, has shown us 
how it ought to be dealt with. It ought not to be despised 
or ignored, or, worst of all, reviled on the one hand, or 
conciliated and softly spoken to on the other, but it must be 
frankly and honestly met face to face. What we have 
before us is the conflict of two antithetical conceptions of 
the universe; two radically opposed views as to nature 
and man, their constitution, course, destiny. It is here 
where the issue must be joined, the battle fought out. 
Compromise is impossible, a mechanical view of the uni- 
verse leaves us no freedom, and so no God ; a spiritual or 
theistic view of the universe leaves order, because it affirms 
reason, but it denies necessity. If the movement be intel- 



RELIGION IS ADMIRATION 89 

lectual, the intellect alone can meet and master it. It 
will not do to leave it, on the one hand, to the blended 
anathemas and lamentations of pietism, or, on the other, 
to the effusions of cosmopolitan religious sentiment. The 
men who believe that the highest truths of religion are the 
highest truths of reason must speak as they believe. There 
is no worse foe to his faith than the man who hates rational 
thought as if it were the invention of Satan, rather than 
the gift of God ; there is no man who so little understands 
faith as the man who thinks devout feeling or an inspired 
heart, the whole of religion. Emotion is particular, thought 
is universal; what belongs to emotion has no worth but 
for the individual; what exists for thought has value for 
all. Fine sentiments do not make strong men; massive 
truths are needed to move rational minds. Where truth 
is concerned, thought must be exercised in order that true 
feeling may be created and right conduct result. He who 
does not seek to know the truth can never truly either live 
or love. In a recent work on ''Natural Religion" we have 
what we may call an attempt at an Eirenicon.* The ground 
of peace is to be the dictum that religion is admiration; 
and we all admire : the man of science, the order and im- 
mensity of the universe ; the man of culture, the perfection 
of manhood and the creations of art ; and the man of faith, 
God and the ways of God. But the only point of agree- 
ment is in the word admiration ; in the thing there is radical 
difference. We admire the admirable, and the admirable 
we do not feel, we conceive. The absolutely admirable 
is the absolutely perfect ; what is less than this we do not 
wholly admire. Physical harmonies are not moral, may 

* The reference here is to a once famous book by the late Professor 
Sir John Seeley. It was in point of time after Ecce Homo, but in the order 
of thought before it. 



go GOD AS THE ALTOGETHER GOOD. 

awaken sensuous wonder, or awe, not the finely touched 
moral admiration which cannot choose but worship. 
The harmonies of a perfect culture or perfect art may 
impart the highest intellectual or imaginative pleasure, 
but cannot kindle the admiration evoked by the absolute 
ethical beauty of the Altogether Good. This latter stands 
alone, for it alone is worship, born, as it were, of the vision 
of God. And he who would obscure this vision and make 
it a matter of no moment, or a thing that may be without 
God, knows too little of the nature of religion to be a maker 
of peace. 

2. Our position, then, is fundamental: we must build 
on the conception of God, find in it the material for the 
bulwark that needs to be raised to meet and break the 
modern intellectual movement towards ancient heathen- 
ism. The Christian idea of God is full of unexhausted 
possibiHties ; it is rich in wealth unworked by thought, 
in unevoked energies for religion and conduct. It is simply 
the sublimest idea that has ever dawned upon the mind of 
man ; — holds in it a multitude of elements any one of which 
is grander than all the sublimities of science. Do men 
stand in awe before the immensities of space and time, 
oppressed by the vision of the countless suns and systems 
that sleep in the bosom of the infinite, shine to each other 
as stars, and move in their vast orbits as to stateliest music ? 
Yet what is that to the thought of an Intelligence that 
knows no here or there, only an everywhere ; no yesterday 
or to-morrow, only an Eternal Now? What is it to an 
Intelligence whose reason is order, who had but to think 
to create all worlds, to whose thought these worlds are but 
the words and syllables of a visible speech ? Geology 
has opened up a marvellous vista into the past ; imagina- 
tion grows giddy as, standing with its feet on the solid earth, 



SCIENCE IN NATURE AND IN MAN 9 1 

it looks back into the eternity behind it, and sees the slow- 
passing ages that are the successive moments in the history 
of its own becoming. But that is a brief and empty vision 
compared with the thought of a God whose home is eter- 
nity, who ever was a Maker, whose purpose runs through 
all ages, and whose will works in all worlds, whose reason 
made and maintains the order of the whole, yet whose heart 
waits on all persons and creates all good. 

And if we turn from science in the universe, and look 
at science in relation to man, his problems, his sorrows, 
his miseries, his mysteries, our religious conception is 
touched with a sublimity still more incomparable. Science 
has achieved much through and for man ; yet it must not 
be forgotten that man has made the sciences, not the 
sciences man. The better he has become, the more they 
have grown; and so it has been through what religion 
has made him that he has been able to make the sciences. 
They have in many ways blessed their maker, have en- 
riched his life, filled it with innumerable interests, given 
him command over nature, its resources and forces, have 
caused him to become a wonder to himself, made his prog- 
ress and discoveries his greatest astonishment. But in 
one aspect the sciences have accomplished singularly 
little ; they have not found out how to make man a perfect 
or even a better moral being ; they may have lessened the 
suffering, but it is doubtful whether they have increased 
the happiness of the world; it is certain they have not 
found any way by which a guilty man may be made good, 
or a will in rebellion against order brought into harmony 
with it. On the contrary, modern science has made a 
nobler morality and remedial moral action a harder, I 
do not say, a rarer thing. Its most distinctive doctrine 
is, when applied to our gravest moral and social problems, 



92 

a ruthless doctrine. Progress is worked through the 
struggle for existence and by survival of the fittest. That 
means the non-fittest either do not, or should not, sur- 
vive ; if they ought not to live, it is on the ground that it is 
better for the whole that they perish. But now note 
the pitiless way in which this doctrine acts, how it para- 
lyzes beneficence and all the gracious and remedial hu- 
manities. It estimates a man solely by his worth to the 
community, and is proud of him only as he has the strength 
that can be victorious in the struggle. He has no per- 
sonal value in its eyes. Wasted manhood is manhood 
to be abolished, not reclaimed. Moral evil is a species 
of disease to be cured by being killed ; disease is a sort of 
social crime to be punished by death. Disease and crime 
are thus alike guilty, sins against the common good, and 
the sinner is to be neither spared nor saved, but simply 
and speedily destroyed. Society so conceived is void 
of moral qualities; it is a realm where strength is king, 
where order is but the action of victorious force, where 
the feeble and the bad are alike offenders against law and 
dangerous to life. In it the gentle spirits have no place, 
nor the tender souls that cling to the strong, soften them 
into helpfulness and sweeten them by their fragrance. A 
doctrine that knows no pity can work no cure ; in a society 
where destruction of the guilty and the weak is the only 
remedy there may be victorious forces, but there cannot 
be happy men. 

3. Now, let us look at our ultimate Christian conception 
in the same relations, see how it affects our idea of man, 
alike as individual and as race, both in harmony and out 
of harmony with the higher laws of life and being. God is 
reason, and reason is order; His rational thought is the 
basis of all our harmonies, whether physical or moral. 



AND MAN AS HE IS TO GOD 93 

But reason is not blind, its very means are ends; it loves 
the instruments it makes to use. The men God thought 
into being God loves ; they exist for His purposes, and His 
purposes must be good. A spirit is not like a mass of 
organized atoms in process of ceaseless change, losing one 
form only to assume another, in all its changes never in- 
creasing and never decreasing the sum total of the forces 
of the universe ; it is simply a permanent being, progressive 
because permanent, endowed with almost infinite capabil- 
ities. Spirits rose to be society to God; His beatitude 
blossomed, as it were, into creation, and men became that 
the subjective happiness of the Infinite might become 
objective. But spirits are by their very nature objects 
of discipline ; they are here to learn obedience, to become 
by it sons of God. That is the end ; towards it all the moral 
agencies of the universe work. A man is in God's sight an 
actual or potential son, known and handled as such ; there, 
because God loved, able to sin, to be miserable, but not 
able to compel the God who loved to hate him, or refrain 
from working the utmost good his badness will allow. 

But if we so conceive the relation of the Creator to man, 
think how we must conceive human life. Every man is of 
value to God, has a place in His purpose and a part in His 
love, and so the man's loss is, as it were, a loss to God. 
It is not enough, then, that the fittest survive, and the 
non-fit die; it is necessary that the utmost and best pos- 
sible be made out of every man, that the strong do not 
simply forbear to crush the weak, but use their strength to 
protect him, that he too may become strong and sound. 
The man who has most afiinity with God will be the most 
beneficent of men ; he will hate guilt, but be pitiful to the 
guilty, doing his best not simply to punish crime, but to 
convert the criminal, that by conversion of the persons 



94 MAN AS HE IS TO THEOLOGY. 

he may make an end to the thing. On the mechanical 
theory the hope of the world lies in the penalty that deals 
quickest and most utter death ; on the Christian, in the 
regeneration that changes the man and uplifts the life. 
The state of struggle which science glorifies is a state of 
war, or, at best, of the armed truce which breeds coarse 
and selfish passions in those who see in the weak and bad 
only elements of disturbance; but a state of moral law 
which religion postulates, is a state of discipline and prog- 
ress, where the good of the whole is worked only through 
the service and good of all the parts. Kepler thought 
that to discover the laws of the universe was to think the 
thoughts of God after Him; the Christian believes that 
by devotion to his kind, lessening its evil and misery, 
multiplying its virtue and happiness, he is fulfilling the 
purpose of God. Through the good man the plan of God 
is realized ; he is a factor in its fulfilment. To him while 
men do evil, or suffer, or are ignorant, something is which 
God hates, which he as God's liegeman must contend 
against and destroy. 

Where this idea reigns it commands the mightiest moral 
enthusiasms and energies into the cause of progress, bids 
them work for the amelioration and happiness of the 
race. The man possessed of God is an enthusiast for 
humanity; his passion is to see realized in time the ideals 
of the Eternal. And so we must maintain our funda- 
mental Christian conception, but make it in its fullest 
integrity the basis of our intellectual and therefore of 
our moral life. The spirit of man has grown sadder, I 
had almost said more savage to himself and less merciful 
to his fellows under the sway of the more speculative sci- 
ences. Life is losing its enthusiasms, men are growing 
weary of it, feeling it a more insoluble problem, a more 



THE INDUSTRIAL CLASSES AND RELIGION 95 

intolerable burden. Pessimism is the coming philos- 
ophy; the Unknown of Spencer is being translated 
into the Unconscious of Von Hartmann, and a world 
which is only a struggle for existence is being openly de- 
scribed as so miserable as to be much worse than none. 
The result is inevitable; empty life of its transcen- 
dental and divine ideals, and it ceases to be worth living. 
Once it so ceases, men will not be at the trouble to live it, 
or to mend it. The belief in God is the inspiration of man ; 
the moment it dies progress will cease, reaction will begin, 
and the race of men stand within measurable distance of 
their end. 



IX 

But we come now to another and even graver series of 
problems — those concerned with the relation of religion 
to the estranged of the industrial classes. 

I. For these classes belong to what may be called the 
region pf practical politics. I may at once and frankly 
state that I do not regard the causes of estrangement here 
as in any appreciable degree intellectual, due to so-called 
difficulties of belief. They are mainly practical and 
political, due to the inefficiency of the churches, their 
failure to make religion the personal and social force it 
ought to be. I know that there is much active and ag- 
gressive disbelief among working-men, but I also know 
that it draws much of its vigour from the social, political, 
and economical doctrines with which it has been skilfully 
allied. It is the positive, not the negative doctrines 
that attract and command the industrial classes. It 
is also true that the objections to religion that prevail 
among them can be better met by instruction than by 



96 THE WORKMAN DIFFERS FROM THE THINKER. 

argument; for these objections are for the most part 
based on partial or erroneous ideas as to what religion 
is, and what is necessary to it ; on the narrowest and least 
enlightened views as to the Bible and its history, and 
the relation of its history to the truths it reveals. Hence 
the main matter here is not apology; it is exposition; 
the opportunity created is not for a reasoned defence, 
but an exhibition of the religion in its truth and in its 
power. 

But this seems to me the very hardest thing to attain; 
yet the most necessary of attainment. Our history and 
our methods are here alike against us, so much has to be 
unlearned and undone, so much to be learned and accom- 
plished. The conflict with revived heathenism hardly 
troubles me — the nature of man is a sufficient guarantee 
that the victory will be to the ideal and divine. But here 
it is not nature, it is the churches that are concerned. They 
must work in the spirit of the Master, and for His ends, 
do what they have never yet done — full justice to the 
religion of Christ. There is one thing I profoundly feel — 
the way in which the churches, taken as a whole, have 
allowed the industrial classes to grapple, almost unaided, 
with their problems, to fight, unhelped, their way into 
their liberties and rights. I will not speak of the Estab- 
lished Church, of the way in which it has pauperized the la- 
bourer and divided the aristocracy, whose education it has 
controlled for centuries, from the people of England ; and, as 
a consequence, from the conditions that make the simplest 
justice natural and possible. Of these things I will not 
speak, for I feel too deeply our common sin, and am too 
anxious to reach the question. What is the remedy for those 
ages of neglect and wrong-doing ? The simplest is here the 
completest answer ; the churches must set about realizing 



SAVED PERSONS SAVE THE WORLD 97 

the religion of Christ, making it a veritable law for life, trans- 
lating its principles into living forces not for the mainten- 
ance of what is, but for the creation of what ought to be. 

2. I wish, indeed, not to be misunderstood. To me the 
primary work of the religion is to save men ; of the churches, 
to preach the Gospel. This is fundamental, work that must 
be done before anything else is possible; that left undone 
disqualifies for everything else. It is through the saving of 
persons that the world is to be saved. But what concerns 
us is not this primary duty, but the conditions necessary 
to its fulfilment; how the churches are to become better 
able, as regards the great body of the people, successfully 
to carry it out. It is not enough to organize evangelistic 
missions, however excellent and fit these may be. It is 
not the distinction of the industrial classes to be in pecu- 
liar need of conversion; it is the need of the so-called 
upper classes in a still more eminent degree. What is 
necessary to reach and affect both is a more fully realized 
Christianity, the resolute endeavour to bring the religion 
professed of the churches into completer harmony with 
the mind of Christ. The toiling classes do not feel what it 
can do for them, or see what it has done. The Gospel 
is full of a large economical spirit, and it was never so needed 
to be heard as at this hour. There is the land question, 
whether it be good to allow the aggregation of land into 
a few hands, to permit the rights of property to override 
the duties of humanity; and whether it be within a man's 
moral power to depopulate the district he owns, or sac- 
rifice the people who lived in it and by it to his own pecu- 
niary and ambitious schemes. On a question like that 
the religion that loves man and lives by his love has the 
foremost right to be heard. 

Then, too, this religion ought to have something to 



gS RELIGION VERSUS CAPITAL AND LABOUR. 

say on the question of Capital and Labour. To it the 
millions that toil are not ''hands," but are men, the neigh- 
bours and brothers of the rich, to be dealt with as their 
own flesh and blood. The question is not settled when 
labour gets a fair day's pay for a fair day's work, or, what 
is as necessary, gives a fair day's work for a fair day's pay. 
That is but the mechanical and mercantile side of it — the 
engine well stoked that its full power may be put forth; 
beneath it lies the religious side. Men do not cease to 
owe each other the primary and cardinal religious duties 
when they become employers and employed ; they rather 
owe these in an increased degree. Here men are brothers, 
bound to love one another ; and love has its duties and its 
services as well as labour and capital. These duties and 
services do not, like the condescension of the great or the 
charity of the rich, destroy self-reliance and lessen self- 
respect; but they are able to create and enlarge both. 
There is no inspiration in mere mercenary toil; the wage 
paid only in money degrades both him that gives and him 
that takes. To work well a man must love his work, and he 
can never love his work if he hates or despises the persons 
for whom or through whom it is done. The employer of 
labour who is no lover of man will never ennoble the labour 
he employs. Were the Christian idea of brotherhood 
made a living and governing idea, our gravest industrial 
problems either were solved or would never have been pro- 
pounded. Labour would then have all its rights, and neg- 
lect none of its duties ; capital would then, in doing all its 
duties, obtain all its rights. ''Common interests" would 
then be no mere phrase, but a beneficent reality, for where 
all were inspired by one spirit, all would be partakers of 
one body, and members one of another. Were the kingdom 
of God realized, every man would be in his own order a 



RELIGION OUGHT TO BE SECULAR 99 

worker, and every worker would receive his due and suffi- 
cient reward. 

3. These must stand as types of what is meant rather 
than as discussions of a large and grave theme. Religion 
ought to feel that social and industrial questions are pecu- 
liarly its own, and cannot be wisely or justly determined 
without its help. And to feel an obligation ought here to 
be to fulfil it; loss of opportunity is loss of actual and 
inherent power. Religion would be all the stronger for 
being more real, — an operative and efficient factor in the 
spheres where men most strenuously live. Secularism 
should have had no excuse for its being ; religion ought to 
be secular, and would be all the more spiritual and eternal 
for so being. What does not make the most of man for 
time and of time for man will not make the best of his eter- 
nity. Eternity is now ; the man who is, is man the im- 
mortal, and the aim of religion ought to be to realize the 
ideal of God in every man and in all his relations. For it 
is certain that the more the mind of Christ obtains outside 
the churches the greater will be its purchase over the 
thoughts of men within them. If we do nothing toward 
the incarnation of His mind in society and the State, we 
shall find that the forces now coming to the front will 
not be faithful or respectful to religion, or even tolerant 
of it. Democracy is everywhere in the ascendant; the 
age of despotisms, of one-man sovereignties, is passing, 
has almost passed. The people are now the State, their 
will is the regnant will, and that will has this character- 
istic — it loves principles, it hates compromises ; and the 
principles it loves must be regulative, fit to be applied 
to the work and guidance of life. And if religion is to 
control life, religion must become what Christ meant 
it to be, a real and applied law, opening its un worked 



lOO ONE HOUR OF THE MASTER. 

mines of social, industrial, and political wisdom and 
truth. 

Oh, I often wish for one hour of the Master ! What 
a revolution His mere appearance would work in the 
churches that call themselves by His Name ! Would 
He not speak somewhat thus? "I came not to create 
immense vested interests, wealthy corporations that fear 
loss too much either to gain men or to do justly between 
the poor for whom they are and the rich through whom 
they are; nor to form organized societies too anxious to 
justify their past sins to mind their present duties. I came 
to create a kingdom of the truth; where the truth was 
to reign and regulate all the relations of life, the conduct of 
all men and classes. My Gospel was to save sinners, to 
create peace between men and God, but also between 
man and man. All men were to be brothers ; each was to 
be loved of all, and the common law the law of love. My 
truth is denied because My law is neglected; do not ex- 
pect men to believe while you disobey. Let the reign of 
God be realized in your societies, and His Word will soon 
be victorious on the earth." 



X 

We have here simply to state a few duties and ideals 
of the churches which bear upon the determining prin- 
ciples. 

I. The distinction between the Christian religion and 
the churches is here cardinal. The religion creates the 
churches; the churches exist for the religion, interpret it 
to the people among whom they live. This it is which 
constitutes their immense responsibility; men think of 
Christianity as the church they best know conceives and 



MONSIEUR RENAN AND CERTAIN OF HIS SAYINGS lOI 

represents it. Monsieur Renan, for example, in a recent 
book tells the story of his education and loss of faith. He 
makes us feel how the Spirit of Christ fascinated and held 
him with a spell he could hardly break. He says, in view 
of the supercilious scepticism which denies without being at 
the trouble either to inquire or think — "In fact, few per- 
sons have the right to disbelieve in Christianity." But 
now, what gave him the right to disbelieve, what was the 
basis of his own denial? Let us hear: ''One single dogma 
abandoned, one single teaching of the church rejected, is ne- 
gation of the church and revelation." And what does this 
mean? That he construed the religion in the sense and 
terms of the papal church, thought that they stood or fell 
together with it, and so believed himself driven, when he de- 
nied the claims of Rome, to deny the truth of Christianity. 
Yet the same church illustrates in a favourable sense a 
point already emphasized. There is no people so loyal to 
a church as the Irish are to the church of Rome. And why ? 
Because that church has so identified herself with the 
wrongs and aspirations of the people that the people feel 
that in being true to it they are true not simply to their 
best friend, but to the best and noblest elements in them- 
selves and in their history. Let these examples show the 
tremendous responsibilities of the churches ; as they repre- 
sent Christ, the people will believe Christ to be; if they 
make religion live to the people, the people will live for it, 
even though it be in its most imperfect form. 

2. The right of a church to be is twofold; and consists 
(i) in its power to interpret the religion, and (ii) in its abil- 
ity to make it a living and efficient factor of life and conduct 
to the people among whom as a church it dwells. These 
two, indeed, are one; the church that best interprets the 
religion will secure for it the most victorious life. It is not 



I02 RESPONSIBILITY OF THE CHURCHES. 

necessary to insist on this point, for a religious society is not 
vindicated by its history, but by the degree in which it con- 
forms to the essential ideal of the religion, and is capable of 
working for its complete embodiment. This constitutes 
the sole and indefeasible right of a church to be ; the sole, 
for that right is valid, and no other, which is based on the 
possession of the truth ; the indefeasible, for that right, and 
no other, is owned and crowned of God which does His 
work among men. 

3. A church to be loyal to the idea and truths it bears 
must be free. Its ideals are never realized, are only in 
process of realization, and the church that would best 
promote their realization must have no interests but the 
interest they create. Its enthusiasm ought to be for the 
ideal, a conflict against the evils and imperfections that 
are in the present, and a struggle towards a better and 
more perfect future. But in order to this two things are 
necessary; first, the emphasis must lie on the truths and 
ideals it carries, and next, it must be free to work by their 
inspiration and in their methods for their complete author- 
ity and embodiment. An Established Church is not free 
enough to obey its own truth; it too much depends on 
man's law to make him feel the authority of God's. Estab- 
lished churches are always strongest in periods of decadent 
belief ; but weakest in times of commanding and progressive 
enthusiasm. Two things at this moment operate in their 
favour — the conservative* instincts of an old and historical 

* I speak here as the son of a people best represented by Andrew 
Melville in his famous interview at Falkland Palace with King James, as 
described in the diary of his nephew, James: " To the which, I beginning 
to reply, in my manner, Mr. Andrew could not abide it, but broke o£f 
upon the King in so zealous, powerful, and irresistible a manner that 
howbeit the King used his authority in a most crabbed and colerick 
manner, yet Mr. Andrew bore him down, and uttered the commission as 
from the almighty God, calling the King but 'God's silly vassal'; and. 



CONTRAST OF ESTABLISHED AND FREE CHURCHES IO3 

people, proud of their ancient institutions, and the current 
Agnosticism, which makes many too uncertain or too indif- 
ferent in religion to bear the moral strain or tension of the 
Free churches. 

The characteristics most distinctive of an Established 
Church are almost necessarily political and social, but of a 
Free Church theological and ethical. The former may be 
theological and ethical, but in a much less essential and 
constitutive sense than the latter. A Free Church may act 
in the field of politics, but its political is not its primary, 
only its secondary or derivative character. An Established 
Church as established is a church politically created and 
legally guaranteed ; but a Free Church is a voluntary society 
created by affinities of thought and life. This radical dif- 
ference penetrates and determines in the subtlest way their 
respective characters. In the one the expediences and 

taking him by the slieve, says in effect, through much hot reasoning and 
many interruptions : 'Sir, we will humbly reverence your Majesty always, 
namely in public, but when we have occasion to be with your Majesty in 
private, and the truth is, you are brought in extreme danger both of 
your life and crown, and with you the country and Kirk of Christ is like 
to wrack, for not telling you the truth, and giving you a faithful counsel, 
we must discharge our duty therein, or else be traitors both to Christ and 
you ! And, therefore. Sir, as divers times before, so now again, I mutt 
tell you, there are two Kings and two kingdoms in Scotland. There is 
Christ Jesus the King, and his kingdom the Kirk, whose subject King 
James the Sixth is, and of whose kingdom not a king, nor a lord, nor a 
head, but a member ! And they whom Christ has called and commanded 
to watch his Kirk, and given his spiritual kingdom, has sufficient power 
of him, and authority so to do, both together and severally ; the which 
no Christian King nor Prince should control and discharge, but fortify 
and assist, otherwise not faithful subjects nor members of Christ. And, 
Sir, when you were in your swadling-clothes, Christ Jesus reigned freely 
in this land in spite of all his enemies, and his officers and ministers 
conversed and assembled for the ruling and weal of his Kirk, which was 
ever for your well-fare, defence, and preservation also, when their same 
enemies was seeking your destruction and cutting off." — Autobiography 
and diary of Mr. James Melville (Wodrow Society Publications, 1852)^ 
pp. 370-1. 



104 THE GOSPEL IS THE LAW OF GOD. 

compromises of statecraft find a congenial home; in 
the other it is more natural to give authority to principles, 
to receive inspiration from ideals. An Established Church 
thinks of the maintenance of the constitution rather than 
the good of the people ; a Free Church thinks of the good 
of the people rather than the maintenance of the constitu- 
tion, and regards the constitution as good only so far as it 
promotes the people's well-being. The one conceives re- 
ligion as in need of a nurse, the church as favoured by being 
made a suckling of kings; the other conceives religion as 
the nurse and master of sovereign and subjects aHke, a 
kingdom of heaven where every king on earth is a vassal, 
and never can be any more. An Established Church is 
more of a static, but a Free Church more of a dynamic 
force in society; the one seeks its authority in the past, 
the other its ideals and inspirations in the future; the 
first is satisfied with what is, but the other strives towards 
what ought to be the ideally perfect State, where all men 
may exercise the power to use the rights they have won 
as citizens, to realize as persons the image of God, and as 
peoples His kingdom of heaven on earth. 

4. But this involves a further point : Free churches can 
best do their work by being faithful to the truths they 
carry, the Word and Gospel of God. They are not to make 
the truth easy for man, but an authority over him — a veri- 
table divine law. Much of the success and strength of 
Catholicism lies in the way it handles the weaknesses of 
men, in the skill with which it can compel them to serve its 
own ends. But it ought to be our part to speak to the 
noblest in man, to persuade the reason, to command the 
conscience. The higher the motives, the better the man ; 
for debased motives mean a depraved nature and an impure 
religion. Be it ours, then, to speak the truths God has 



THEOLOGICAL AGNOSTICISM — RELIGIOUS DEATH I05 

given, as given of God ; sacrificing no truth manifestly His, 
abating no claim known or felt to be divine. Free churches 
have no prescriptive rights; they must be true to truth 
and duty to live. They must be theological, speak positive, 
constructive truths as to God ; and they must be ethical, 
enforce every real and religious duty men can owe to God 
and man. Men must believe to live, and live as they be- 
lieve. Theological Agnosticism is religious death, leaves 
us without any absolute ethical system, any means by which 
the reign of God can be realized through the reason and in 
the conscience of men. 

As teachers and preachers of eternal truths, what mag- 
nificent institutions our Free churches are, gifted with 
what splendid opportunities for instruction! Millions, 
we may say, meet every Sunday to worship God, to hear 
expounded truths they believe to be His, to confess sin, to 
utter thanksgiving, to plume the wings of hope and en- 
large the spirit of love, so to let glorious eternity stream 
into dull time as to make it seem the luminous garment 
of God. Analyze a single congregation: The employer, 
wealthy, educated, refined; the employed, hard-handed, 
hard-headed, begrimed in body and mind with the dust 
of toil; the teacher, burdened with thoughts communi- 
cable, incommunicable; the scholar, groping his way 
with many a stumble into knowledge ; the mistress from 
the drawing-room ; the maid from the kitchen ; the well- 
to-do man of business, unfamiliar with hardship; and 
the needy tradesman, struggling hard to hold aloft his 
honour and keep the wolf from his door — these and 
hundreds more like them meet to declare by common 
acts and words that they are children of one Father and 
heirs of one home. And, think, the words they hear ought 
to be not only winged, but needed words, able to humble 



Io6 ANALYSIS OF A CONGREGATION. 

or exalt, to warn or encourage, to break into penitence or 
soothe into peace, to brace against temptation or cheer 
in sorrow. In the same pew the new-made bride and 
the new-made widow may sit; the one with a gladness, 
the other with a grief that lies too deep for tears. Side 
by side may worship a soul ripe, chastened, mellowed by 
the sunshine of the divine face, and a soul dumb with 
despair, lost in a night of fear, feeling that he would be only 
happy if he could fall 

"Upon the great world's altar stairs, 
That slope through darkness up to God." 

Now, could anything equal in actual or potential power 
for good institutions that count supreme opportunities 
like these by the thousand ? Churches ought to be the 
most splendid moral forces of the world, for theirs are the 
most splendid moral moments in the life of man. 

5. In conclusion, may I speak a word to you, my broth- 
ers in the ministry of Jesus Christ? But what shall it be? 
I feel — as who does not ? — a feeble man in this work, 
able only to see what a man ought to be ; not able, in any 
tolerable sense, to become it. Brothers, you may ask, 
"Why ought we to differ from other Christian men? 
What is proper in them is not improper in us; we but 
assert our common rights if we claim to live as they." 
True, brothers, if you put it so, and so put I will not argue 
the matter with you. But let me put it thus — Ought we 
not to differ from other men, labour to live more purely, more 
nobly, with more simplicity of mind, more singleness of 
purpose? We have chosen our vocation, and we chose it 
thinking it the highest possible to man, thinking, too, 
that our vocation was of God. And shall we not live, and 
think, and endeavour as if we were the called of God rather 



THE ANCESTORS OF OUR MINISTERS I07 

than as if we were the "Hail Fellows" of the market and 
the street. We have, indeed, joined a noble company, and 
our ancestry is the most illustrious and honourable of the 
earth. It runs back into a most ancient past, and begins 
with those Hebrew prophets who have been dead nigh 
three thousand years, yet they still live as speakers for God. 
Our nearer ancestry is still more glorious. The first 
Christian preacher was Jesus Himself, the greatest of dis- 
courses His Sermon on the Mount. Peter was a preacher, 
impetuous, impassioned, with a speech that was like "a 
mighty rushing wind." Paul was a preacher, great in 
thought, in labours, in the noble obscurity that his spirit 
changed into deathless fame. The muster roll of Christian 
preachers is but the record of the grandest Christian names. 
John, the apostle of love, whose spirit is for ever incarnated 
in our fourth gospel ; Athanasius, the maker for centuries of 
the Christian conception of God ; Augustine, the mind that 
has for ages ruled and still rules the thought of the Western 
church ; Bernard, great as a monk, great as a mystic, but 
greater as a preacher of the truths that moved and re- 
formed the Middle Ages; Martin Luther, son of a miner, 
author of the Reformation, strong speaker of the strong 
words that created Protestantism ; Calvin, son of a French 
lawyer, creator of a modern theocracy, the scholar, thinker, 
and statesman that made the thought and policy that 
braved and beat back the counter-reformation; Latimer 
and Hooker, Baxter and Bunyan, Howe and Cudworth, 
Berkeley and Wesley — these are but typical names se- 
lected from our long ancestral roll, men who have made the 
preaching of the Cross as the very wisdom and the power 
of God. And the vocation these men adorned will honour 
any man or any man's son ; the arduous matter is for the 
man or man's son to honour the vocation. The power to 



I08 A GENUINE APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION 

do SO comes of God alone, and comes only to the man who 
is loyal to His *' everlasting gospel," the Truth which, Mil- 
ton said, is strong, ''next to the Almighty," and remains 
after every conflict, ** fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and 
terrible as an army with banners." 



Ill 

THE SACERDOTAL AND THE PURITAN IDEA* 

TN England to-day two opposed conceptions of the 
^ Christian church stand face to face. The opposition 
is radical — relates to the collective idea and to all its parts, 
to the nature of the church, its polity, functions, offices, 
orders, sacraments, ritual, doctrine. In the last analysis 
these opposite theories of the church mean doctrines of 
religion so opposed that the men who hold them hardly 
ever become intelligible to each other; they speak of the 
things of God in the same mother tongue, but so think of 
them as to be aliens in heart and strangers in mind. Ac- 
cording to the one conception the church is an organized 
society, with a political constitution it owes to its Founder 
and His apostles — visible, historical, a veritable corporate 
divine state, so instituted and guided of God as to be pos- 
sessed of divine authority and invested with divine rights. 
According to the other conception the church is the king- 
dom of God, or of the truth, created and governed directly 
by Christ, composed of His saints, with vassals, but with- 
out princes, civil or ecclesiastical, by its nature invisible, 
omnipresent, ideal, incapable of realization in any or in 
all forms of polity, existing in part in all the churches, fully 
embodied in no one singly or even in all combined. On 

* Paper read before the Congregational Union at Hanley in the autumn 
of 1885. 

109 



no THE SACERDOTALIST AND THE PURITAN 

the one theory certain offices and orders are held to be so 
necessary to the very being of the church, that where they 
are not it cannot be, and where they are they represent 
a regulated and continuous succession which has, through 
all the centuries, been the chosen channel for the trans- 
mission of Apostolic grace ; but on the other theory there 
are no official sanctities, no inalienable orders, no persons 
that must be, in order that Christ may be, in His Church. 
All depends on the indwelling Spirit, and the truth He 
reveals, in order that it may be preached by pure and 
spiritual men. Each conception of what the church is has 
its correspondent doctrine of the sacraments; according 
to the one, they are miracles and mysteries, efficacious, 
where properly administered, for the creation and main- 
tenance of the divine life ; according to the other, they are 
symbols, charged, however administered, with spiritual 
significance and quickening to the man, and to him only, 
who receives them in humility and faith. The theory that 
emphasizes the religious office, order, person, act, is Sacer- 
dotal; the theory that accentuates the religious truth, 
spirit, character, conduct, is Puritan. Sacerdotalism 
makes the worship and honour of God depend on its own 
institutions and modes, and on the ministers it creates 
and controls. Puritanism believes that spirit and truth 
are the only things essential to worship, and godliness the 
mode in which God most loves to be honoured. 

I 

We who are sons are also heirs of the historical Puritanism 
of England; and our position creates our responsibilities 
and defines and enforces our duties. What these are a 
brief historical retrospect may help us the better to under- 
stand. 



ALIVE IN MODERN ENGLAND III 

I. The Congregational system or ideal is not a mere 
theory of Church politics or government, but, fundamen- 
tally, a doctrine of religion, a way of apprehending and real- 
izing the Christian faith. Its ecclesiastical polity is but 
its doctrine applied to the exercise and cultivation of the 
religious life. Catholicism is a splendid system, even with- 
out the religious idea that fills it; but Independency, apart 
from its religious basis and ideal, is at once mean and im- 
potent, impracticable and visionary. Our fathers held 
that legislation, civil or ecclesiastical, could not create 
a church; conversion and converted men alone could. 
All saints were kings and priests unto God, and could 
exercise their functions only as they stood in open and im- 
mediate relation with Him. In His Church Christ did not 
reign while officials governed; He both governed and 
reigned. Over against the Puritan stood the Anglican 
system, which, becoming in the hands of Laud at once 
sacerdotal and imperial, made the king absolute in the 
State that the priesthood might be supreme in the church. 
That policy forced our fathers to feel that freedom, to 
reign in either the spiritual or civil realm, must reign in 
both ; that there could be no Free church while the State 
was enslaved, no enslaved State where the church was free. 
Political liberty and spiritual religion were not two, but 
one; neither was possible without the other; and so for 
both Hampden died, and Milton pleaded, and Cromwell 
fought ; while their resistance to both had the remarkable 
effect of making of Laud a martyr and of Charles a saint. 

(i) Independency for a brief and troubled season ruled 
the destinies of England, but the season, though brief, 
was not inglorious; just long enough to allow its possi- 
bilities and potencies to appear, not to allow its ideal of 
order and freedom and faith to be incorporated. The 



112 THE VICTORY OF A CHURCH MAY BE 

Restoration, which ended its opportunity, was the tri- 
umph, not of reHgious conviction, but of poHtical reaction; 
it might be a Church, but it was not a rehgion which was 
victorious. When we compare the men, the minds, the 
morals, the issues, national and ecclesiastical, of the two 
periods, we have no cause to be ashamed of our defeat. 
If to be too severe in conduct, too pure in morals, and too 
high and ideal in aims, is to err, it is a noble error; but 
noble is the last term any one would apply to the licence, 
the lust, the mockery, the superstitious unbelief that graced 
the graceless court of the restored Monarch. Cromwell 
may have been, as they said, low-born — *'a bankrupt, 
beggarly fellow," who dared to enter *' the Parliament 
House with a threadbare, torn cloak, and a greasy hat," 
which were ''perhaps not paid for"* — but he was so 

* The quotation is from South's famous sermon on "All Contingencies 
under the Direction of God's Providence." It appears as VIII in his 
Collected Sermons, and has for its text Proverbs xvi. -3,7,. It had not 
been heard by Charles II, for it was not preached in Westminster Abbey 
till two weeks after his death. The Lord Rochester, to whom he is 
reported to have said: "Od's — for God's — fish. Lory your chaplain 
must be made a bishop. Put me in mind of him at the next death," 
— was Lawrence Hyde, Clarendon's second son; and not Henry Wilmot, 
the more famously infamous Earl of Rochester, who remained to the very 
end a favourite of Charles, in spite of Burnet, who was not too good- 
natured, saying : " the King loved his company better than his person." 
But Lawrence Hyde was never a favourite of Charles II, whatever he may 
have been of his brother James. What is written in the text has a 
history, which it ought to be judged by. So far as I can remember, 
while attending some Union Meetings I had been the guest of the 
local vicar. He and I had a friendly controversy over the advantages 
and disadvantages of free and written prayers. I told him of what 
had happened lately to me ; how I had gone to a bookshelf and taken 
down the collected edition of South's Sermons. There I found his 
famous sermon on the advantages of written prayers, where he 
satirized those " who had renounced the communion and liturgy of our 
church," and where he speaks of their prayers as "heathenish and 
pharasaical," marked by two things, "length and tautology." And I 
asked the vicar whether a blush would not mantle the cheek of South 



THE DEFEAT OF A RELIGION II3 

governed by the fear of God that he lived a chaste and 
virtuous Hfe, and the more we get into the man's soul, 
the more we see him struggling to subdue his passions 
and serve his God. Charles may have been an agreeable 
and well-born gentleman, but cleanliness in heart, truth 
in speech, purity and honour in conduct, were the last 
things we could ascribe to him, though his most famous and 
favoured Court preacher could say, in the man's very hear- 
ing, too, that his father, the first Charles, was '' a blessed 
saint, a father to his country ; if but for this only, that he 
was the father of such a son." Milton may have been a 
Republican poet, who defended the rights of the English 
people to rid itself, gravely and constitutionally, of an un- 
constitutional king ; but at least he had a soul 

"Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free."* 
Wycherleyand Dryden may have been Royalist poets, who 

when he thought of men like Baxter, like Howe, like Bunyan and 
Milton, who had all renounced the communion and liturgy of the 
Established Church. The only answer I could get to the question was: 
"So it seems to us"; and I felt naturally provoked that a man like 
South should dare to speak disrespectfully of words used by men in the 
presence of Almighty God, who were, to say the least, his equals in 
piety. I do think that Burnet had some excuse when he described 
South as "a learned but ill-natured divine." For not only did he charge, 
in their supreme act of worship, men who never came into the presence 
of the Almighty without thought, with being thoughtless men ; but he 
could not speak of Cromwell with his "torn cloak and greasy hat" with- 
out saying that "perhaps they were not paid for." Even a man in his 
own communion, like Dean Sherlock, he sneered at as "a hen-pecked 
husband." 

* The two things that Milton mainly loved were "piety" and 
"liberty." Piety he described as directed equally "towards God and 
men," "not vain and wordy" piety, which was to him abhorrent, "but 
efficacious and active." Freedom he again defined as the same thing as 
piety, which was to be "wise, just, temperate, self -providing, abstinent 
from the property of other people, and, therefore, magnanimous and 
brave," "the opposite of all that is the same thing as being a slave." 
He f eaxed kingship because it threatened liberty. 
I 



114 MEN WHOM THE CHURCH AS THE RESTORATION . 

graced the Restoration ; but the one is famous only for im- 
purities that cause honest men to loathe the tongue in which 
they are written ; and the other for a happy variableness 
that reflected the changing faiths and fortunes of his time. 
Nor need we be ashamed of our divines. John Owen may 
stand alongside Archbishop Sheldon, '*a man of no great 
religion," as Burnet said; Thomas Goodwin need not fear 
comparison with Bishop Gauden; Theophilus Gale, the 
very ideal of the Christian scholar, gentle and patient amid 
persecution and loss, will not suffer even if placed beside 
Bishop Pearson ; John Howe may well blush to be bracketed 
with Robert South, though the insolence of the Court 
preacher might notice the blush only to misread it. No; 
our Puritan age does not call for humiliation and shame; 
of it every Englishman who is not a bigot is in the heart of 
him proud. It lasted but a generation, but in great men, 
great questions, great conflicts, great issues, simple heroism 
and magnanimous patriotism, it was the most fruitful and 
illustrious age in our annals. Without it the English people, 
neither here nor beyond the sea, would have been in liberty, 
in enterprise, in civilization, in progress, in religion, what 
they are to-day. And that age was the creation of the faith 
our churches live by; and was inspired by the ideals they 
lived, and still live, for. In that hour its capabilities took 
visible shape, and showed how they could translate the 
religion of Christ into the character, the ambitions, the 
achievements, and the institutions of a free people. 

(ii) The church of the Restoration, then, is here regarded 
as in a preeminent degree political and civil; it had, as 
it were, a dynastic function, became the safeguard of the 
Crown, the bulwark of the monarchy, and was itself for 
this purpose legislatively secured and fortified. The 
men of the Reformation, for religious reasons, legislated 



KNEW IT DECLINED TO KNOW II 5 

against Rome; but the men of the Restoration, for politi- 
cal reasons, legislated against Puritanism. Their design 
was, by making dissent illegal, to make an end of dis- 
senters ; the result was to change the arena without chang- 
ing the essential issue of the struggle. It became in form 
more political and less religious, though it remained in 
essence religious where most political. Our fathers had 
to contend for the liberties they had been deprived of; 
their opponents had to justify the deprivation. Liberty 
was demanded on many grounds, as the nature of religion, 
the constitution of the church, the rights of conscience, 
the claims and freedom of the citizen; liberty was re- 
fused on varied grounds, as the divine right of episcopacy, 
the divine rights of the king, the danger of dissent to the 
unity of the church and the safety of the State. The 
struggle was unequal. Our fathers had to wrestle against 
the powers that were; but these had to contend against 
the forces that were making history, the Providence that 
was shaping the present and determining the future of Eng- 
land. The Revolution ended the divine right of the king; 
the Act of Toleration ended the ecclesiastical rights that 
had been based on it ; and the church had to seek in the will 
of the majority, or something equally unstable, a new ground 
on which to defend its privileges and supremacy. The 
political conflict has raged for over two centuries, and the 
end, though not yet, is nigh at hand. The victory is sure, 
and on some early morn we shall wake to hear the glad bells 
telling that the strife is over, and peace has come, for an 
equal and gracious freedom has arisen to reign. 

But now the point to be here emphasized is this : for the 
last two centuries and a quarter we have been forced to 
accentuate our political doctrine, to claim and vindicate 
our very right to be. To win back our liberties has been 



Il6 THE PURITAN OF HISTORY 

a tedious and toilsome labour, often in form political, always 
in spirit and basis religious, the work of men who despised 
force, and believed in the essential reasonableness of the 
right. But now, what is the issue of victory to be? Clearly 
renewed and enlarged obedience to our religious doctrine. 
As our liberies grow, our duties increase ; the less we have 
to claim from the State, the more we have to do for it and 
for religion. To have room for the realization of our spiritual 
ideal is to be under the holiest obligations to realize it. 

2. But our duty has been defined for us not simply by 
our inner history, but also by our outer relations. The 
struggle for political freedom conditioned our development ; 
the struggle to maintain political ascendancy has condi- 
tioned the development of the Anglican church. We, for 
the sake of religion, suffered under civil disabilities ; it, for 
the sake of ascendancy, suffered under disabilities we may 
name religious. Onward from the Restoration the church 
faced the country as a body that had everything to gain by 
conserving things as they were, everything to lose bychange 
and the forces that worked for it. It was enriched with so 
many privileges, that political progress could seem to it as 
but a process of progressive impoverishment. Jealousy 
for its political mission and possessions would not allow it 
to do justice to its religious ideal, and so for long it nursed 
able ecclesiastics rather than godly divines. The revival 
which came to relieve the spiritual barrenness of the eigh- 
teenth century, while it penetrated, and in a measure leav- 
ened, the church, was yet alien to the Anglican genius and 
ideal; and was treated as such, as a thing that belonged 
to dissent, and was uncongenial with church traditions. 
And so, while the Evangelical revival was as the very 
breath of life to our Free churches, it lived as a stranger and 
pilgrim within the Establishment, and died before a revival 



ENGLISH WITHOUT BEING ANGLICAN II 7 

more in harmony with the Anglican ideal. With the 
causes of the Anglo-Catholic movement, I am not here 
concerned, though it is well to note that it was partly due 
to the victory in the State of the very principles for which 
our fathers had contended. Just at the very moment when 
it had become manifest that the policy of repression and dis- 
ability had utterly failed, and failed because the root-ideas 
of independency had penetrated the State, and converted 
it first to toleration, and then to methods of equity and 
freedom ; — there came, not an evangelical, but an ecclesi- 
astical revival, begotten, as it were, out of the very essence 
of the Anglican church, and with the design of making it 
conscious of its distinctive meaning and mission. And so 
its authority was magnified, the apostolicity of its orders 
and doctrines was affirmed, its bishops were invested with a 
more awful dignity, and its priests with more sacred func- 
tions ; its Prayer-book was filled with a deeper significance, 
its services were made to articulate a larger and lovelier 
faith. The revival showed its essential churchliness in this : 
it was a divisive as well as a quickening movement, in the 
degree that it increased life it lessened charity. The sec- 
tarian spirit has grown under its influence, and Anglo- 
Catholicity has made new and sharper differences in English 
religion. Worship has become more ornate, but brother- 
hood is less recognized and realized ; whether the change be 
a gain, is not a matter it becomes us to discuss. 

II 

What, then, is the sum and moral of our past discussion? 
This is the sum : at the very moment when the Providence 
of God has so ruled our history as to leave us free to realize 
our characteristic religious idea, we are confronted by its 
very antithesis — a resurgent sacerdotalism. And the 



Il8 ATTITUDE OF THE PURITAN TO THE CHURCH NOT 

moral is like the sum : the moment that has so come is our 
supreme opportunity, full of all the responsibilities and du- 
ties such rare opportunities bring. Our use or our neglect of 
it will, therefore, determine whether we are a people called 
of God to do the work that now needs to be done in England. 
What that work is, is the thing we have now to understand. 
Our work may be shortly defined as the creation of the new 
Puritanism; what this is may be best explained and ap- 
prehended through its antithesis, the new Sacerdotalism. 
These represent, not only the old historical antitheses of 
the church, but the alternative ideas and doctrines of the 
Christian religion now before the people of England. 

I. Our fundamental attitude to the Anglican church is 
not determined by the principle or fact of Establishment. 
That is a mere accident, of but occasional significance, 
destined to an early ending; and certain, when ended, only 
to leave the two systems the more openly and the more 
resolutely face to face. There are unestablished Episcopal 
churches ; and the Anglican church disestablished will be 
Anglican still, in ecclesiastical character and tendency 
strengthened rather than weakened by the change. The 
political controversy hides rather than reveals our differ- 
ences, softens rather than sharpens our essential antagonism. 
Were it out of the way we should confront each other 
on the plane of a still more radical and vital opposition; 
we should be opponents — reverent, generous, and char- 
itable, but certainly clear and resolute opponents in the 
interpretation of the religion of Jesus Christ. 

In saying this I do not mean that we represent different 
and rival church polities. Episcopacy and Independency 
are opposed as aristocracy and democracy are opposed; 
but they concern only the method in which the life ought to 
be organized, do not concern the agencies and means of its 



DEPENDENT ON ESTABLISHMENT II9 

creation and the conditions of its maintenance. What I do 
mean is that the native and reigning tendency of the AngH- 
can church, certain to grow the stronger the more she is 
reHeved from the rehgious disabihties incident to civil 
estabhshment, is sacerdotal ; while the native and govern- 
ing principle in Independency, which must, if there is to be 
life, increase in the degree that religious liberty prevails, 
is Puritan. And these terms, I repeat, represent funda- 
mental and material differences in our notion and doctrine 
of religion. 

2. What is Sacerdotalism? It is the doctrine that the 
man who ministers in sacred things, the institution through 
which and the office or order in which he ministers, the 
acts he performs, the sacraments and rites he celebrates, 
are so ordained and constituted of God as to be the peculiar 
channels of His grace, essential to true worship, necessary 
to the being of religion, and the full realization of the reli- 
gious life. The sacerdotal system, with all its constituents 
and accessories, personal, official, and ceremonial, becomes 
a vast intercessory medium, held to be as a whole, and in all 
its parts, though organized and administered of man, so the 
creation and expression of the divine will as to be the super- 
natural, authorized, and authoritative agency for the recon- 
ciliation of God and man. So conceived. Sacerdotalism is 
not a question in church polity ; it may need bishops, but 
bishops do not necessarily either imply or involve it. A 
man may, for many reasons, exegetical, historical, empir- 
ical, hold that episcopacy is the true, or the safest, or the 
best ecclesiastical polity, and yet be strenuously opposed 
to a priesthood or things priestly. Where the Sacerdotal- 
ism comes in is where the man and the institution, with the 
acts and articles needed for its operation, are made so of 
the essence of religion that where they are not it cannot be 



I20 



in its truth and purity; that to belong to it a man must 
belong to them, that through them, and them only, can 
God come, as it were, into full possession of the man, or 
the man into full and living fellowship with God! The dif- 
ference then, between church polity and Sacerdotalism may 
be stated thus: the one is a formal, the other is a material 
question; the one relates to the form under which the 
Christian Society is to be ordered, maintained, and realized, 
but the other relates to the actual nature and matter of 
the Christian religion ; what it is, and what is necessary to 
its being and its work. The question as to polity is im- 
portant, but secondary; the question as to Sacerdotalism 
is primary and essential. It signifies, at root, what do men 
mean when they speak of Christ and the Christian religion. 
3. So much for Sacerdotalism in the abstract; let us 
now look at it in the concrete, as in part realized and labour- 
ing after fuller realization within the Anglican church. Its 
historical basis and framework is the Anglican polity, 
which it builds on, fills up, and explains thus: It affirms 
(i) that this polity, with its various clerical orders, is of 
divine institution. Christ entrusted to the College of the 
Apostles plenary ministerial authority, sent them as He had 
been sent, endowed with the power to transmit what He 
had given, just as He could give what He had received of the 
Father.* In accordance with this divine authority they 
created, and filled with duly qualified men, certain orders 
or grades of ministers. They appointed Deacons to serve 
in things secular, to care for the poor, to preach, and even 
to baptize. They appointed Presbyters or Bishops to 
serve in things sacred, to teach, to guide, to govern the 

* " A Father in Christ." Sermon preached in St. Paul's Cathedral at the 
consecration of the Bishops of Lincoln and Exeter, by H. P. Liddon, d.d;, d.c.l. 
Second edition, pp. 8, 9. 



121 

flock, to celebrate the eucharist — indeed, to exercise full 
ministerial functions, except in the cardinal matter "of 
transmitting the ministry." And, finally, they instituted 
a special order, represented in the primitive Church by 
Timothy and Titus, whose high function it was to ordain 
the men chosen to sacred offices. 

It affirms (ii) that this order, which is apostolic, survives 
in the modern bishop, who stands in the direct line of apos- 
tolical succession. In Judaism the sacerdotal principle 
was physical because hereditary, one inherited the priest- 
hood, whether high or common, by virtue of the purity of 
his blood ; in Anglicanism the principle is social and hieratic, 
a theory of lineal hierarchical descent. Levi was in the 
loins of Abraham when Melchisedec met him ; the Anglican 
and Catholic bishops were in the spirit of Paul when he 
ordained Timothy and Titus. 

It affirms (iii) that the bishop is necessary to the being 
of the priest. He alone can ordain the man who possesses 
full ministerial capacity; men not so ordained may preach, 
or even administer baptism, but the communities in which 
they serve ''lack participation in those privileges which 
depend upon a ministry duly authorized by Christ our 
Lord."* It affirms (iv) that without the priest so ordained, 
worship in the full spiritual Christian sense is not possible, 
for on him depends "the validity of the eucharist." f It 
affirms (v) that the sacraments are the means necessary to 
the creation and maintenance of spiritual life. Baptism is 
"the great sacrament of our regeneration"; and what is 
termed the eucharist is "our chief means of communion 
with our Lord." J 

And these parts so hang together as to constitute a 

* "A Father in Christ," Preface, p. xxxviii. f Ihid., p. 15. 

I Ihid., p. 15 ; Preface, p. xxxviii. 



122 NO BISHOP, NEITHER PRIEST NOR CHURCH. 

logical and consistent whole ; the polity is a divine creation, 
the very form in which God decreed religion to be realized 
in the world. The episcopate is "organically necessary to 
the structure of the visible Body of Christ"; ''necessary 
not merely to its bene esse, but to its esse''^ We can, 
therefore, weave together the ideas into a connected whole 
thus.\ without Christ there could have been no apostles; 
without apostles, no bishops; without bishops, no priests; 
without priests, no sacraments; without sacraments, no 
church; without the church, no Christian religion. The 
theory is sublime and consolatory when viewed in relation to 
the church which possesses these divine orders, prerogatives 
and graces. And the gentler spirits that hold it are moved 
with pity when they turn to those who choose to dwell in re- 
gions where are none of "the chartered channels" through 
which the river of life loves to flow. Yet the pity is soothed 
by the thought that even ' ' lay-baptism " is valid, and we are 
graciously comforted by the assurance that it ' ' carries with 
it a share in the communion of saints, and, much more, a right 
to bear the Christian name." But lest we be exalted above 
measure, we are reminded that lacking "a duly authorized 
ministry," we lack "in particular the precious sacrament of 
the Body and Blood" of our Lord.f The old saying was, 
"No bishop, no king" ; the new saying is, "No bishop, no 
priest, and no priest, no church " ; and so the last consequence 
is that the religion of Christ has vital or real and authorita- 
tive being for the people of England only as the Episcopal 
and Sacerdotal Church lives and reigns in our midst. 

* " A Father in Christ," p. 13. f Ihid., pp. xxxviii-xxxix. 



FALSE REASONS FOR REJECTION OF SACERDOTALISM 1 23 



III 

Such, then, in brief and bare outline, is the resurgent 
Sacerdotahsm ; and our question is, How are we to deal 
with it ? 

I. Well, let me say at once, roundly and frankly, not on 
the ground that it unchurches us. It may be a hardship to 
be unchurched — that depends on the right of the person 
who does it, or the wrong inflicted on the person who suffers 
it to be done. If we feel pained at being unchurched, it 
need not mean that we pity ourselves; it may be due to 
regret that men we respect have so exceeded their rights and 
so misconceived their duties. To unchurch is a twofold 
process : it affects alike him that does and him that suffers ; 
and its quality may be the very reverse of the mercy that is 
twice blessed. The grounds on which we are unchurched 
will cut off the body that does it from the communion of 
all the Reformed Churches ; and we may well stand com- 
forted and undismayed in so goodly a company. If, then, 
we are unchurched, though it may grieve the gentle heart 
that loves to think well of all good men, and to be well 
thought of by them; yet it need wound no man's con- 
science, weaken no man's faith, lessen no man's sense of 
acceptance or communion with God. But while we have 
never said, and may not say, the Anglican system is false 
because it is so hard on us and other communions, the sacer- 
dotal attitude may yet raise a deeply religious question. 
We do not wish our faith to be misjudged ; we will not have 
the mind of our Saviour misconceived and misconstrued ; 
so while it may be a small thing to be told "you are without 
orders and outside what we regard as the church," it may be 
a great thing to determine whether the body which says 



124 WE OUGHT TO BE GENEROUS IN OUR 

this is rendering into authoritative speech and act the very 
mind and meaning of our Lord and Master. The Anglican 
church best knows what its own history and theory demand 
— concerning these we have neither complaint nor remon- 
strance to offer; but we must be allowed to judge its claim 
and action in the light of the spirit of Christ. Whether it 
be here a really sufficient and authorized interpreter of the 
religion of truth and love, is a question we as Christian men 
are bound to discuss and to do our best to determine; and, 
happily, it is a question which all can discuss and may even 
determine. 

2. Our question, then, is very different from one that 
simply regards ourselves, and objects to a system on the 
ground that it is hard on us; but before attempting to 
answer the question a precautionary remark must be al- 
lowed. We must be fair and just and even generous in our 
interpretation of the men and the system we have to criticize 
and to resist. For there is affinity within and beneath the 
difference: we are Christian and Evangelical, and so are 
they. The spirit and inspiration of this resurgent Sacer- 
dotalism is religious. It is not the creation simply of 
reaction, but of a living faith, of a splendid and self- for- 
getful zeal. It is like the old , yet unlike it — larger, nobler, 
more generous; under its passion for the past works the 
spirit of to-day. It has, in a degree unknown before, filled 
the idea and history of the church with religious contents 
and ideals, and made the very terms ''High Church" 
convey another meaning to us than they conveyed to our 
fathers. It does not, as in the time of Laud, make extrava- 
gant claims for the sovereign and ally itself with oppres- 
sion and tyranny; he understood the text which invited 
men to worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness to refer 
to the garments, to the beautiful array in which the people 



INTERPRETATION OF THE MEN WHO OPPOSE US I25 

were to adore God, or to the beauty of the building where 
God was to be adored ; but our Fathers concentrated their 
effort on the congregation and imagined the beauty to be 
moral. But the new ''High Churchman" stretches out 
hands to the people, is zealous in their cause, and has bidden 
some of the church's most distinguished sons speak brave 
words on behalf of the oppressed. The party has thus a 
larger idea of the church, its rights and possibilities and 
duties, than Laud ever had ; and though its zeal for man 
works under ecclesiastical forms, it is real and redemp- 
tive zeal all the same. Ritual is used for the creation of 
faith; and means by the altars, sacraments, vestures, 
processions, and postures, to make Christ's presence and 
work more real to the sense and so to the spirit of man. 
There therefore is real evangelical purpose in the heart 
of the ecclesiastical revival, and only as we feel and appre- 
ciate this shall we be able to do generous justice to its mean- 
ing and spirit. The noble ought to be nobly entreated 
even while resolutely opposed. 



IV 

I. In one fundamental respect, then, the new Sacer- 
dotalism and the new Puritanism agree. Both are in spirit 
evangelical. We say, and they say, the supreme matter 
is the reconciliation of man to God through Jesus Christ; 
the great end towards which all the energies of all the 
churches ought to be directed is to bring Christ nearer to the 
men who need to be so reconciled. But here precisely our 
criticism begins — what this Sacerdotalism seeks to do, it 
fails, and, by its very nature, must fail, to accomplish. It 
is a means absolutely unsuitable and inadequate to its own 
end ; for it builds faith in God on the church rather than the 



126 THE PRIEST IN RELIGION HOLDS APART 

church on faith in God. It makes the church so limit and 
condition God's approach to the soul and the soul's ap- 
proach to God, that these two are held apart rather than 
brought together by it; it circumscribes and controls His 
action ; His action is not allowed to fill it, as it were, with 
His own free and gracious infinitude. To be more specific : 
— it seeks to give salvation and life through an elaborate 
mechanism, always liable to be deranged or even broken, 
rather than through the operation of the spontaneous and 
sovereign grace of God, and the truths that are expressive 
of it. God has bound his grace to one Person, and to one 
Person alone, in the whole history of man; and He has 
so bound it, not for the purpose of keeping it narrow, but 
of making it broad ; not for the purpose of causing it to flow 
through certain ''chartered channels," which, because 
chartered, always tend to grow muddy, stagnant, and 
undistributive, but that it may remain a river of pure 
water, bursting, as it were, from its spring in the heart of 
the Eternal, and flowing on in ever statelier volume towards 
its home in the Eternity yet to be. Christ, I say, is a Uni- 
versal Person; He is ''the true Light that lighteth every 
man coming into the world."* He is "the only begotten 
in the bosom of the Father," who hath come forth "to 
declare Him."t Christ is every man's; every man is 
Christ's. It is the will and purpose of God that the grace 
that came through Him be absolutely universal and ab- 
solutely free, limited by no organism built and directed 
of man, dependent on no conditions prescribed and en- 
forced by men. 

2. Now Sacerdotalism does two things: (i) by its 
doctrine of the church it limits the universality of Divine 
grace. Think, were the organized episcopal and sacer- 

* John i. 9. t John i. 18. 



GOD AND THE SOUL; AND LIMITS GRACE I27 

dotal churches the only adequate organs and representatives 
of Christ, the only true qualified interpreters of His truth, 
what a limitation they would be to His presence and action 
alike as regards range and reality. We believe that He is 
everywhere — in every thought of good, in every gleam of 
truth or word of comfort or touch of healing that comes to 
man ; and, if Christ is to live, our ideas on this point must be 
enlarged rather than circumscribed. We represent an 
ancient ancestry; the Anglican church represents the 
same ; but, if history proves anything, it is the absolute in- 
sufficiency of that church to the work of realizing in England 
and for its people the religion of Christ. Without us and 
the other Free churches would that religion be alive in our 
midst to-day? Nay, what and where would the Anglican 
church herself be without the streams of life we have poured 
into her? without the quickening and emulation that have 
so often provoked her to zeal and to good works? Grace, 
to be universal, must be free; to bind it to a sacerdotal 
organism would be to limit its range, lessen its energies, 
perhaps to cause its death. 

But (ii). Sacerdotalism not only makes the grace of 
God narrow and partial; but conditions it on imperfect 
men. The men who have shared in the reproaches of a 
hard, a limited and unconditional theology, know what is 
meant when we say : — theology chastised us with whips, 
but sacerdotalism chastises us with scorpions.* It is 
better to believe that the grace of God is limited than to 
act as if it were, or as if its distribution had been granted to 
imperfect and spiteful men. For how could they be en- 
trusted with so great a thing as the power to administer, the 
right to give or withhold the means of ' ' our communion 
with our Lord " ? To possess it were to be depraved by it. 

* I Kings xii. 4, 11, 14. 



128 ANGLICAN MEN SAINTLY AND NOBLE 



I would not speak one disrespectful word of Anglican men ; 
they are men often saintly, noble, and generous. But to 
make a bishop necessary to the being of a priest, bishop and 
priest necessary to a sacrament, bishop, priest, and sacra- 
ment necessary to the very existence, in their fulness and 
truth, of the church and the religion of Jesus Christ, would 
require every bishop and priest to be so pure, so holy, so 
possessed of human pity, so full of Divine tenderness, that 
men should feel as if the priest-bishop were a very "only be- 
gotten Son of God," to whom they could come as unto God 
Himself. Think what it is to be able to hold and command 
the approaches of God to the soul and the soul to God ; and 
the more we see into what it means the more we shall con- 
clude that the person fit to occupy so awful an office must 
be in quality of manhood and reality of Godhood the kin 
and brother of the Christ. Where God has placed His own 
well-beloved Son no other can be allowed to stand, especially 
no imperfect man, liable to error of judgment, infirmity of 
will, failure in charity, or in truth of spirit and of word. 
"There is one God and one Mediator between God and 
men."* A multitude of mediators were as bad as a mul- 
titude of gods ; • the way of the soul to the Father and the 
Father to the soul must be open, common, free. 



I. Here, then, lies the fundamental difference — the 
cardinal truth of Sacerdotalism is ecclesiological, but the 
cardinal truth of Puritanism is theological. The one mag- 
nifies the church, the other magnifies God. The one must 
have a church that it may have religion; the other must 
have religion and truth that it may have a church. Sacer- 

* I Tim. ii. 5. 



YET SERVE AN IDEA SENSUOUS AND SACERDOTAL I29 

dotalism may have a splendid idea of the church and its 
history; but to secure it the idea of God has to be made 
narrow and mean, adjusted to the spirit and aims and 
achievements of the institution that claims to be ''the 
chartered channel" of His grace. Puritanism has a broad 
and generous idea of God, which lifts it above the poor 
ideal realized within its own and all other churches, and 
enables it to regard them as humble means to a Divine end, 
agencies for the creation of a sublimer religion than history 
has yet seen realized. 

2. The sublimity of the sacerdotal idea is sensuous; it 
appeals to the eye and heart by the wonderful historical 
structure which has needed so many hands and so many 
ages to build up. But the sublimity of the Evangelical 
ideal is spiritual; it appeals to the spirit and imagination 
by its marvellous idea of God and those purposes of His 
that needed eternity for their shaping, and time for their 
unfolding, and will need an eternity for their fulfilment. 
The ultimate truths then, through which we live and on 
which we build, which governs all our thoughts and de- 
termines all our ideals and endeavours, is the Eternal 
and Sovereign Fatherhood, which is absolute and universal 
in its grace. By Him and unto Him are all things ; churches 
are means in His hands, created for His ends ; they are to 
be judged through Him, He is not to be conceived through 
them or comprehended by them. Nay, more, not only 
they, but the religion they exist to realize must be inter- 
preted, not through canons or decrees of councils, not 
through priests and sacraments, not through bishops and 
popes ; but through — and through only — the truth of 
the regal and regnant Fatherhood. 

3. Now, this fundamental truth gives us a truer and 
higher conception of the reign and providence of God than 



130 THE SACERDOTAL IDEA ECCLESIOLOGICAL 

is expressed in any theory of ecclesiastical supernaturalism. 
We do not believe in a forsaken humanity, which knows 
God's presence only as it possesses a marvellous and miracu- 
lous church; we affirm that nature is everywhere rooted 
in His real yet supernatural activity; that history every- 
where manifests it, for "in Him we live, move, and have 
our being."* We do not believe in sacraments so little 
sacramental as to depend for their very being on an im- 
mense series of accidents, like the official succession, me- 
chanically regulated, of mortal and fallible men; we main- 
tain that the channels and means of His grace are as infinite 
in their variety as the ways of His working. Our fathers 
said: "We must realize a theocratic State; the ideal of 
the Old Testament is not a sacred mysterious thing in- 
tended to remain remote from all reality, but is meant for 
realization. God ought to be our King, the State ought 
to be His church, the people ought to stand in covenant 
relations with Him, His moral right to be their civil and re- 
ligious law." We affirm the ancient principle, but change 
the application, and say: "The New Testament ideal is 
truer ; we are bound to realize it, to translate it through our 
churches into the realities of thought, society, and the 
State. It does not represent simply a miraculous, but 
a creative moment; from that moment forward it was 
God's purpose that His Kingdom should, through the 
churches of His Son, take creative and corporate being 
on earth. We deny that the age of miracles is past; it 
is an age that ever is, for there ever is the living God 
who inspires the spirits that believe, guides the society 
of His saints, and never ceases to work among men in 
behalf of His truth." In this there is a grander theory of 
the Divine Presence and the Divine Providence than any 

* Acts xvii. 28. 



BUT THE PURITAN IS THEOLOGICAL I3I 

ever expressed in the doctrines of Apostolic Succession, 
Episcopal Grace, or an Infallible Chair. God has never 
left Himself without a witness. His lines are gone out 
through all the earth, and His Word unto the ends of the 
world. 

4. The fundamental difference, then, which divides the 
evangelical from the sacerdotal idea, is theological; the 
Gospel reposes on the sovereign paternity of God, and His 
immediate relation through Jesus Christ with all men. 
But in this is contained a second difference which is as 
decisive and determinative — the conditions of accept- 
ance with Him are all spiritual and ethical. They are in 
no respect sensuous and formal, depending on rites observed 
or external relations established; but universal and pos- 
sible to all men, they spring out of the very natures of 
God and man, and what may be described as their primary 
and essential relations. God is spirit, and man is spirit; 
He seeks after man, and man feels after Him ; and the con- 
ditions are such as become those natures and those rela- 
tions. "He that cometh to God must believe that He is, 
and that He is the rewarder of them that seek after Him." * 
Other conditions can no man frame than God has framed : 
' ' Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ, is begotten 
of God," t and to be so begotten is to be "an heir of God 
and a joint heir with Christ." f 

VI 

But it may be said : ' 'All this is abstract ; it has nothing 
to do with religion as realized in history." 

I. Well, then, let us become concrete and historical, 
at the point, too, where history is supremely significant, 

* Heb. vi. 6. f i John v. i. J Rom. viii. 17. 



132 THE FUNCTION OF THE PASTORAL EPISTLES. 

the Primitive Church. But if we do go back to it, it must 
not be to discuss simply whether apostles were germinal 
bishops, or bishops are evolved apostles, or whether there 
was an order, impersonated in Timothy and Titus, that 
was neither Apostolic nor Presbyterial, but a tertium quid, 
the mystic heir to the plenary power which the apostles 
had received. No; this is a question not merely of certain 
orders or offices, but of the whole meaning and essence of 
the Christian Faith. That cannot be a good way of repre- 
senting Christianity which is not Christ's way. That 
cannot be Apostolic truth which was unknown to the 
apostles, and contrary alike to the spirit and matter of 
their thought. The function of the Pastoral Epistles is not 
to interpret either the Theology or the church of the New 
Testament ; that Theology and that church must interpret 
those Epistles. The nature of the function becomes evi- 
dent when explained through the religion ; it is not possible 
to interpret the religion through the functions, especially 
when they are made to bear so extraordinary a burden as 
the full proof of our official Sacerdotalism. 

(i) Here, then, our question is: What did Christ mean 
to do? and what did He actually accomplish? He created, 
it is said, a visible society, constituted a faith and order 
of His own. Granted; but what sort of society, con- 
structed according to what idea of faith and order? It was 
a society of saints, a communion of saved men, called of God 
to the faith and the fellowship of His Son.* But now a most 
remarkable thing in the society was this: it was human 
and spiritual, not hierarchic or hieratic; it was a brother- 
hood which knew and allowed no priesthood, and was 
described by terms that denoted a free and equal citizen- 

* See the chapters, infra, on " the action of Jesus in founding His society " ; 
and " the teaching of Jesus as to His church." 



THE IDEAL OF RELIGION IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 133 

ship, not by terms that implied or required a sacerdotal 
constitution. In it no man was named a "priest," no 
material sacrifices were enforced, no ritual was enjoined 
or provided. In both the teaching and the lives of Christ 
and His apostles, nothing is more extraordinary than the 
complete absence of sacerdotal elements and acts. ' ' Sacri- 
fice" has a purely spiritual sense; "prayer," "praise,'^ 
"obedience," "charity," "the devotion of the living man 
to the living love that is the highest law," are the 
only things denoted and described as "sacrifices." The 
word "temple" is used, but never in a material sense; 
it applies to the purified man, or the purified society, 
or to the mystic Person of the Lamb, who is priest, 
sacrifice, altar, temple, all in one, the means and the 
seat of the reconciliation of God and man. Now, how 
comes it that Christ so constituted His society? It 
could not have been by accident; it must have been of 
set purpose and by express design. If He sent His apostles 
to establish and extend the society He had founded, then 
it was one without any priestly orders or offices, with all 
the old sacerdotal customs and acts translated into ethical 
and spiritual ideas. And if, uncertain of His meaning, 
they were ever forced to interpret His words through His 
life, what would they find? That He never claimed to 
be a priest, boasting no priestly descent, and that while 
on earth He lived remote from the temple. He wor- 
shipped without the help of the priesthood, in the company 
of men pure in heart and strong in faith; and He 
loved to be alone with the Father, to speak to Him in 
the simple speech of the spirit and the truth. This 
independence of the priest, and opposition to his mind 
and ways, was the very offence that brought Him to 
the cross. What Jesus was. His society was to be, as 



134 HOW IS THE KINGDOM OF GOD DESCRIBED? 

little sacerdotal, as beautiful in its holy simplicity, pure 
spirituality, and noble devotion to the needs of men and 
ends of God. 

(ii) But the society Jesus founded He named ; He called 
it ''the kingdom of God," and "the kingdom of Heaven." 
Now how is this kingdom described? As one constituted 
by the very being of its King; it needs but Him to be, 
and no officers are appointed to make or enforce its laws, 
to control or conduct its affairs ; nor is any provision made 
for their appointment. It is real, yet ideal; has most 
actual being, yet can never take visible shape. The sensu- 
ous, who look for it without, never see it, for it exists 
within; the pure in heart see it as they see God, every- 
where, and in everything, in the moral energies that work 
for good, in the moral agencies that cure our ills. It is a 
kingdom of the spirit, its citizens are the holy of all time, 
the notes of citizenship are ''righteousness and peace and 
joy in the Holy Ghost."* Now, while Jesus founds the 
kingdom. His apostles plant churches — and why? Not 
to be, but to serve, the kingdom ; to create its idea within 
man and its reality among men. It is an error of the first 
magnitude to confound the churches with the kingdom; 
they are not distinct aspects of the same idea, but as dif- 
ferent from each other as means are from ends. Jesus 
alludes to the church only twice, but He never ceases to 
speak of the kingdom; all His discourses and parables 
are concerning it and what it means. The apostles speak 
but seldom of the kingdom, and always with awe, as of some- 
thing peculiarly God's, which may be witnessed to, entered, 
or inherited, but can never be founded, ruled, or constructed 
of man. The churches, on the contrary, are the familiar 
scenes of their activity and concern ; their great problems 

* Rom. xiv. 17; cf. Gal. v. 22. 




A REALM OF LOVE I35 

are how to multiply, plant, water, teach, rule, purify, 
energize, and uplift them. These churches constitute a 
unity, but it is ideal, not actual, through their relation 
to a common head and service of a common end, not through 
their articulation into a political or corporate organism. 
The churches existed for the kingdom, and were means 
for realizing its ends, making men into citizens, obedient 
to God, organs of His will ; so living in time under the ideals 
and inspiration of eternity that His will might be done on 
earth as in heaven. But means and ends had to agree 
in character and quality; the Kingdom was spiritual, 
ethical, the realm of faith and love, and the church had 
to be the same ; no system of inalienable orders graded 
in the way the sacerdotal mind loves, but the beneficence 
and energies of converted men disciplined and directed to- 
wards the conversion of the world. 

2. And how were these churches founded, edified, and 
governed? Was it by men specially ordained and com- 
missioned by the college of the apostles? The man most 
eminent in this work was Paul, and he was made an apostle 
neither by men nor through man, but by the direct vocation 
of God and the revelation of Jesus Christ.* While Paul 
was the ordained of God, Matthias was the ordained of the 
apostles; but his election, so far as history knows, was 
fruitless enough, for we never hear of him again. As his" 
election did not exclude Paul from the apostleship, his 
orders were either invalid or alienable, and in either case 
the consequence is alike fatal to their supernatural and 
sacerdotal worth. But so far as Paul is concerned, the 
call of God, without choice or act or decree of the apostolic 
college, constituted his only and sufficient title to the 
highest ministry. It came before, and it existed without 

* Gal. i. I, II. 



136 NO APOSTOLIC COLLEGE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 

the laying on of apostolic hands: nor did he stand alone. 
The ministry of Barnabas did not wait on his ordination; 
Apollos ''watered" churches, but there is no record of 
his ever having received ''orders." The authority the 
Anglican speaks of was never claimed by the apostolic 
college: there was, indeed, no college to claim it, all our 
evidence in this matter being in favour of action almost 
always independent, and often not harmonious. God 
instituted the ministry, and appointed apostles, prophets, 
evangelists, pastors, and teachers. His vocation and 
inspiration were larger than the "chartered channels," 
burst through them, and so overflowed the earth. The 
man of proved spirit was the approved man, made by the 
sufficiency of God a capable minister of the New Testa- 
ment. 

Never, then, was any society so free from sacerdotal 
taint as the Primitive Church ; all was spontaneous and 
spiritual, marked by freedom from the bondage of the 
letter and the law. Sacerdotalism, wherever it has existed, 
has done two things; it has so organized and exalted its 
sacred orders, priesthood or clergy, as to supersede or throw 
into the background the idea of God as a living and im- 
mediate presence for the soul, and it has made formal, 
ceremonial and moral observances take the place of ethical 
obedience, moral and spiritual conduct. The New Testa- 
ment insists on two things, the exact contraries of these: 
(i) the Sovereign Paternity of God and the absolute free- 
dom of His grace, alike in His saving and in His endowment 
of man ; and (ii) man's worship as a worship in spirit and 
in truth, or his obedience as altogether moral and in no 
respect ceremonial. The new Puritanism is but an attempt 
to realize these New Testament ideals under the conditions 
of our modern life, and apply them to the spirit and needs 



OR CONTROVERSY IN THE RELIGION OF CHRIST I37 

and aspirations of the whole man and every man, as well 
as to society and the State. Christ hath made us free, 
and we must stand fast in His liberty that we may the 
better serve His kingdom and save our kind. 



VH 

But, now, how are we to do what is our manifest duty, 
and realize the evangelical ideal, or the ancient and pure 
religion of Christ and His apostles? Not by controversy; 
that is a rude and impotent weapon, especially if followed 
for its own sake. We ought never to have controversy 
with men, only with false systems, and with what is false 
only that we may win the fitter opportunity to speak 
the truth. I protest against a mere polemical attitude, 
which expresses simply aversion and antagonism to a 
system that is not our own. I protest against the 
handling of Anglo-Catholicism in a spirit of shallow 
mockery, or the small witticism that describes it as devo- 
tion to ecclesiastical millinery or a passing fashion in dress. 
The Anglican men are in earnest ; they ought to be resisted 
by men too much in earnest to do anything but to go right 
to the heart of the matter, the faith by which the system 
lives. If they have a truth to offer, let us be prepared with 
a higher and sublimer truth. 

I. Our work, then, to be effective, must be creative, not 
controversial ; we must begin where our fathers began — 
with God. No age ever so needed faith in the gracious 
sovereignty of the Eternal Father, who so loves the lost 
as not to spare, but deliver up to the death for them 
all. His own beloved Son. I would it were possible to do 
as much for the Christian conception of God as men do 
for the theory and ritual of the Catholic or the Anglican 



138 THE MAJESTY OF GOD MAKES POMP TAWDRY. 

church! Were it possible to place Him in all His Divine 
love and beauty before the hearts and consciences of men, 
we should, even in spite of the bonds and fascination of 
sin, draw them after Him in wondering faith and adoring 
worship. Magnify God, and the magnificence of churches 
will grow mean in His presence, their pomp seem tawdry, 
and their eloquence become dumb. 

Then over against their doctrine of the sacraments 
place the faith in the personal and reigning Christ. He 
sanctifies all places, makes everything sacramental, speaks 
to us through all the beneficences of time, in all the needs, 
sins, sorrows, sufferings, loves of men. His altar is every- 
where, and everywhere His sacrifice ; in every outcast, in 
all the afiiicted let us hear His voice, saying, ** What ye 
do unto these, ye do unto Me!" His atonement is too 
universal, too spiritual, too infinite in its worth, to have 
its meaning or merit, or efficiency conveyed in any outer 
or material form, and we ought, without ceasing, to show 
how the very simplicity of our sacramental symbol makes 
it the more of a reality to the spirit. 

Further, over against their official priesthood, let us 
place the spiritual priesthood, the office and the function 
at once common and sacred to all believers. If they say, 
'*Ye are no priests" — never mind what they say; but 
let us feel, every man of us, that we are priests, standing 
before God for men, before men for God. Let us create 
in our little churches the feeling, certain to lift them above 
all littleness of spirit or of speech, that they are priestly 
bodies, where every man by watching and prayer, by 
personal communion with God and loving intercourse 
with men, can help to work the reconciliation of humanity 
and God. Then, too, over against their organized sacer- 
dotal society, let us place our Christian brotherhood, our 



LOYALTY TO A CHURCH NARROWS BROAD MINDS I39 

commonwealth of saints, where every man is free to ex- 
ercise all his rights and bound to fulfil his every duty. 
And, finally, over against their theory of the continuity of 
the apostolic succession, let us set our faith in the continuity 
of religious life, which makes us possess the truth and hold 
communion with the saints of all the churches, share in 
and sympathize with all the good of all the ages. 

2. It is possible for a man to be strangely loyal to his 
church; the narrower, or what is, unhappily, the same 
thing, the higher his doctrine, the more passionate the 
enthusiasm it will evoke. If he feels that God has con- 
stituted his church, that it is built according to a Divine 
idea, which is expressed in its very framework and unfolded 
in its outer history, that the priest of to-day and the many 
hundred generations of priests before him, have come by 
the miraculous ordination of God, then he may well be 
loyal, even to the point of extravagance, if such a point 
be possible, to the church he so conceives. Yet enthusiasm 
for the past of an organized society, based on the belief that 
its history is the history of God's action for a people, or a 
province, or an era, may be intense, but cannot be humane or 
generous; it may imply a fine historical sense, but it ex- 
presses a mean notion of religion, and the God who reveals it. 
Our notion of the church is a larger and less palpable and 
measurable notion, for we dare not limit to so mean di- 
mensions His Providence, and the gracious Paternity that 
controls it. Our loyalty is not to an organized historical 
institution, which, though large as the Catholic, or rich as 
the Anglican church, would yet seem to us ignobly small 
and poor if regarded as a sufficient vehicle for a religion 
we believe to be of God, but it is to an infinite ideal. These 
churches are too mean for our devotion, too narrow for our 
sympathies, too earthly for our aspiration and our faith. 



140 THE CONFLICT OF TWO IDEALS. 

We believe in a society of the saints, distributed through- 
out all ages, scattered through all lands. We believe in a 
God who forsakes no man, hates no man, and works as 
continuously and as graciously without as within the 
churches that call themselves by His name. W^e believe 
that this God has called us to faith and obedience, and has 
given to us all, whether lay or clerical, sacred ordination 
by His Holy Spirit, that we may, as true heirs of apostolic 
grace and channels of apostolic life, preach the gospel of 
His Son to the men of this lost, yet living world. 

3. And now, if we believe in our mission, we must not 
leave its fulfilment to chance ; we must make it our special 
duty and concern, and work like men who mean to have 
their ideal realized. If the Sacerdotal idea is to be super- 
seded it must be by an idea sublimer, truer, and more 
spiritual, and so our need is men who not only believe this 
idea, but are able so to present it as to win to faith and 
obedience our cynical and sceptical age. You know what 
is meant ; on the ministry of the next generation the future 
of our Congregational churches depends. If we are careless 
or faithless in the making of our men, we simply surrender 
the future to the prouder and the wealthier church. There 
is no system that has more historical pride than the Anglican, 
and none that can so little bear historical criticism; and 
our men ought to confront it like men who can measure 
its claims and its worth simply by telling the story of its 
becoming. But this is not enough ; they ought to be pos- 
sessed and inspired by a living faith, penetrated and governed 
by the theology that conceives and explains God as the 
personal and regal Father, who will have all men to be 
saved ; and if they are so possessed or so inspired they will 
be neither keen critics nor effective controversialists, but 
something unspeakably nobler — preachers of eternal truth. 



CHURCHES EXIST TO SAVE MEN I4I 

Nor is this all; practical work is needed, accomplished by 
spirits that do not calculate and that seek no reward ; work 
among the lapsed, the outcast, the ignorant, the suffering, the 
sorrowful, the despised and neglected of men. Churches 
that do not feel that they exist to save men are nigh unto 
death . They best serve the State who do most to end the sin 
and ameliorate the misery of man. The time is at hand 
when, our great ecclesiastical conflict over, we shall be face 
to face, not with the Establishment, but with the Anglican 
church. Let us then make it manifest that we claim every 
man in England for Christ, and that we mean every man to 
feel what the grace of God signifies for him. If we so inter- 
pret our mission, then we shall accomplish a work that will 
make it impossible for the sceptre that controls English 
destinies ever to pass into the hands of a disestablished 
sacerdotal church, and we shall help to keep it for ever 
in the hands of the risen and reigning Christ. 



IV 



ECCLESIASTICAL POLITY AND THE RELIGION 
OF CHRIST 

I 

I. /^^HURCHES and societies, like men, ought to be 
^^ studied in their actual histories, but through* their 
distinctive ideals. The most prosaic person has in him a 
vein of poetry which must be found if his behaviour in the 
higher and more critical moments of his life is to be under- 
stood. And the most utter church of the Philistines has 
its ideal elements, if they survive only as the memory of its 
ancient or recent feuds with the people of God. It is well 
to be just even to Philistines; and what they aim at being 
and doing may better express their spiritual qualities and 
capabilities than what they actually are and do. The ideal 
is what every church is directly and altogether responsible 
for, but its realization is always conditioned, either 
favoured or hindered, by the conflicts and limitations 
of place and time. If the ideal is impracticable it is 
bad and impotent, but where real and living it is real- 
izable; and the struggle towards realization is certain 
to ameliorate the conditions, whether political, intellec- 
tual, moral, or religious, amid which it is carried on. 
The dream of a golden age, or the vision of a city of 
God floating before the imagination of man as a glorious 

142 



ECCLESIASTICAL POLITY AND THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION 1 43 

possibility towards which he must with all his energies 
and through all his ages continue to work, certain that 
though it ever retreats it is yet being ever approached, 
is, in its power to repress the worst and quicken the best 
in him, a more potent factor for good than the best possible 
methods known to the science of economics for the accumu- 
lation and distribution of wealth. Material conditions of 
well-being are good only so far as realized by men who 
themselves do well. 

Now perhaps the fittest introduction to the study of the 
action of ecclesiastical principles in history is the study 
of the ideal, or the aims that, through the polity which 
can best be described as Congregational, the churches that 
profess it seek to attain and realize. It is only from this 
point of view that it is possible to do justice to the 
meaning and mission which churches as such possess. It 
is here their positive character comes out, and their 
polity appears in its true nature and spirit and purpose, 
not as it seems under the perversities and perversions of 
the hour, but as it stands, as it were, in the light of eternity, 
seeking to have the reign or kingdom of God realized on 
earth, not in an ecclesiastical corporation identified with 
religion and worked in its name, but by the regeneration of 
men and the consequent regeneration of the families, the 
societies, and the States they constitute. The great concern 
of every ecclesiastical polity ought to be the making of men, 
and through those it has remade the making of a new 
heaven and a new earth, wherein shall dwell righteousness. 
It works therefore through the individual, but not simply 
for him, seeks his good as a means rather than as a mere 
end in itself. It believes that as instituted by Christ and 
as administered by Christian men, it is designed to be the 
most flexible and educative of polities, the least capable of 



144 WHAT CONGREGATIONAL AND INDEPENDENT SIGNIFY. 

being perverted from spiritual and ethical to formal and 
interested ends. It is, too, able to exercise Christian man- 
hood and teach it how to apply Christian p'rinciples to all 
matters alike of policy and practice, and the best qualified 
to keep the sensuous elements and accidents of religion in 
the background, while holding its living truths and creative 
ideals ever to the front. What can be said in exposition 
and defence of this belief is the matter that more specially 
concerns us here. 

2. It may be as well that we determine at the outset the 
meaning and relation of certain terms which are here to 
be extensively used, like Congregational and Indepen- 
dent, which do not, as here employed, denote a modern 
denomination. Neither is a very happy or distinctive 
term, but each is too historical and well established to 
be displaced. They are not mutually exclusive, rather 
mutually suggestive, for each directly implies the other. 
An Independent becomes in its ultimate analysis a Con- 
gregational polity, and a Congregational must be Inde- 
pendent. The one term is constitutional, denotes the 
organizing principle or idea of the Society as well as 
the form under which it lives and does its work; but 
the other term is relational, defines and describes the atti- 
tude in which the society stands, and must, because of 
its very constitution, stand to every external authority. 
A Congregational polity is a polity which regards all legisla- 
tive functions, whether disciplinary and j udicial or dogmatic, 
as the possession and inalienable right of the congregation, 
or, in the New Testament sense of the term, the church ; an 
Independent polity is a polity which declares this possession 
and right inviolable, things with which no alien is free to 
meddle. The terms are thus strictly correlative and supple- 
mentary; while the one defines the nature of the society, 



THE ECCLESIAST AND THE ECCLESIA 1 45 

the Other affirms its claim to be allowed to live according 
to its own nature, that it may realize its own ideal. 

Now of these terms Congregational has the more signifi- 
cance, yet it suffers from a radical defect; it hides the 
relation of the polity it denotes to its creative norm, the 
primitive idea of the church, with all that it involves as to 
the nature of the religion intended to be realized. The 
polity which strongly accentuates this idea is not current 
and conventional, but honours the church by being in the 
best sense so purely and so distinctively ecclesiastical.* 
The term ''ecclesiastical," indeed, were it possible to restore 
its simple and noble primitive sense, would best describe the 
one suitable polity. It is significant that the apostles used 
a term with Greek rather than with Jewish associations, 
eKK\r](Tia rather than awa^cxi^r]^ and it is through its Greek 
associations that the term must be interpreted. f In Athens 

* The word "church" was at the Reformation put under a Uterary 
ban. It had been so emphasized as a poUtical and constitutional term 
that the persons who composed it were lost sight of. Hence Luther 
translated iKKXrjcria by "Gelmeine" "the commonalty," or simply "the 
people." He was followed by Tyndale, who translated " congregation," 
by Cranmer and the other English reformers. "Church" was restored 
by the Geneva version, though not universally. In Matt. xvi. 1 8 and 
xviii. 17 it is rendered "congregation." 

f The sentence may be judged incorrect, since the terms differ in mean- 
ing, the one expressing an act, the other denoting a result, but both are 
to start with good Greek, frequent and familiar in the classical literature 
which was older than any products of Hellenism and without any Jewish 
associations. While both terms are used variously and extensively in 
the Septuagint — (Twaywyq translating no fewer than twenty several terms, 
while iKKhrjcla translates but five — each has an assured place in the 
Greek language, which can alone supply us with the necessary etymologies. 
Thus iKKXT](xLa — whose etymon almost all Greek writers give as ^kkXtitos 
from the custom of calling out, or summoning by voice, the citizens who 
constituted the local iKKXrjala — is used by Herodotus, iii. 142; by 
Thucydides i. 31; ii. 36, 60; viii. 67, 81, 97; by Xenophon, Hellenica, 
i. 6, 8 ; iv. 42; by Plato, Laws, ii. 764, 850; by Aristotle, Politics, 
1282 a; and (Twayoyq occurs in Thucydides, ii. 18; in Plato, Thecst. 
i. 150 A, where the reference is to the unskilled midwife who brings 
together or causes to meet the man and woman — cf. Phaedr iii. 266 b. 
L 



146 THE CONGREGATIONAL POLITY 

the eKKXr^dLaaral^ were the members of the eKKXr^aia, and to 
sit, to speak, and to vote there belonged of right to every 
citizen. And the ifCKXrja-ia was the symbol of the autonomy 
and freedom of the city, of all that was healthiest, most 
patriotic and educative in its life. Where every citizen 
knew what it was to be an i/c/cXTjaLaarrj^;, neglected no duty 
it involved, despised or abused no honour it could bring, 
lived mindful of all the responsibilities and jealous of all 
the powers it laid upon him, there the city became the best 
that was possible to it — that most beautiful of all human 
things, the home of freemen, whose noblest faculties were 
all so exercised as to express a spontaneous yet finely 
regulated order. There have been no cities in the history 
of the world so rich in great citizens, in splendid patriotism, 
in culture, art, wisdom, in all fair humanities, as the cities 
where this ideal was most nearly realized. And the primi- 
tive Christian ifc/cXrjaiai, were societies of freemen, organ- 
ized that they might fulfil the duties of their religion, 
realize the ideal of their faith. And every member was 
a citizen of the kingdom, or an eKKXr^a-iaaTr}^^ bound 
to contribute the whole wealth of his renewed man- 
where it stands opposed to distinction or division in speech, and 
thought, and where Socrates gives an excellent example of his grave 
irony — and in Aristotle 1 3 1 6 b ; but as it has not so technical a sense as 
iKKXrjaia, it has the more extensive use of a common term. Yet while 
(Tvvayojyr] started, like iKKXrjala, with Greek rather than Jewish associations, 
its very vagueness as a term helped it to fall more completely into the 
hands of the Jews than did its rival. While awdyeiv, the parent verb 
of away coy-/], translated more than fifty Hebrew terms, ^kkXtjtos, which is 
the root of eKKKrjcyla, does not translate one, the only instance of its use 
occurring where there is no translation, and the verb whence the source 
came has not even a single representative in the whole of the Septuagint. 
* Plato, Gorgias, i, 452 E. Where in immediate apposition we have 
three pairs of terms : the judges on the bench, the councillors in the 
council chamber, and the ecclesiasts in the ecclesia, or, as Jowett trans- 
lates it, "the citizens in the assembly" {Kal iv iKKXrja-ia iKKXTjaiacrras). Cf. 
Apol. i, 25, A. 



AND THE INDEPENDENT CHURCH I47 

hood to the enriching and ordering of the city or society 
that was the home of his soul. Now the poHty which 
attempts to recover this ideal, seeks also to enforce all the 
duties, to affirm all the rights implied, and to work for 
all the ends it involves. The individuals must be perfected 
if we are to have perfect societies, and only as we have 
perfected cities or societies can we have the perfect State. 
The i/cK\r)o-ia(TTaL must be restored to their ancient privileges, 
and made to fulfil their ancient duties, that the ancient 
iKf€\r)(TLa may be regained, the aboriginal ideal of the 
Christian church and religion realized. 

3. While Congregational denotes the normative principle 
and constitution of the society, Independent simply de- 
scribes the relation in which all societies so constituted 
must stand to every authority external or foreign. The 
term in its oldest historical use expressed the right of the 
churches to be independent, as regards interference from 
without, in order that they might live under the sole 
authority of Christ. And so Independency here means 
freedom; "free" is the modern synonym of '* indepen- 
dent."* But the course of history showed that States were 
the most intolerant when the tools of churches ; and so f ree- 



* As stated in the text the term "Independent" is not used in a 
sectarian sense or as denotive of an actual denomination active in 
the spheres either of religion or of politics ; but simply as a symbol 
expressive of "freedom from external restraint or authority." This 
is an idea ancient in our language and cogent in our history. The 
expression appears indeed negative ; but under its negative aspect there 
is a positive determination. It is not freedom from all law, but only from 
such as appears in " external restraint and authority," and it implies, where 
the authority is inner, the obligation to obey. It was thus as opposed to 
law as such, never said to be, even in the hot days of controversy, anti- 
nomian, though often declared to be autonomian, i.e. the man was never 
without the law or against it ; it came from the interpretation of himself 
and must be of his own making to be obeyed. This was the meaning that 
Henry Jacob gave to the word when he spoke of the church as "an inde- 



148 FREEDOM FROM THE LEGISLATIVE CONTROL 

dom alike from the legislative and administrative control of 
ecclesiastics, became in the modern State as necessary as 

pendent body-politic, endowed with power immediately under and from 
Christ." And so Hobbes when he argues that in civil government there may 
be more "than one soul," "not one independent commonwealth, but 
three independent factions," means that these factions set themselves, in 
obedience to a law given in their very being, against the will and power 
of the commonwealth. So when he speaks of the Independents as a body 
of men who had " killed God's Anointed," he thinks of two authorities, each 
being external to the other, as coming into collision. But the last quota- 
tion suggests a distinction between " Independency" and " Independent." 
The one as political was the name of a faction ; but the other as religious 
expressed a given attitude to authority as external or uncorroborated 
and unconfirmed by personal experience. Thus Selden says that Inde- 
pendency is ' ' agreeable to the primitive times, before the emperor be- 
came Christian, for in those "primitive times" "every church governed 
itself"; and he adds, "your Independent would have every congrega- 
tion as church by itself," i.e. he condemned them for being too faithful 
to "primitive times," which was rather odd. But the oddness is capable 
of explanation. If the "Table Talk" represents Selden's mind between 
1634 and 1654, it is not too much to suppose that the latter reference 
was made when "the presbyterian man" had produced "the Inde- 
pendent man." As is independency such are the Independents, the 
men who are bound to promote the principle. Hence the authors 
of the Apologetical Narration expressly repudiate what they well 
call "the proud and insolent title of Independency," which had 
already won its conventional modern sense, and they claimed 
to be dependent on God, and to do His will, though as Independent 
they "resolved not to take up a religion by or from any party," and 
to seek "no other interest or design but a subsistence, be it the poorest 
and the meanest in our land." The gravest fault which was charged 
against "Independency" by the man John Milton in his famous sonnet 
on "the New Forcers of Conscience" called "Shallow Edwards," was its 
assertion of "toleration and the pretended liberty of conscience." 
Clement Walker, the politician and M.P., who was besides the professed 
historian of Independency, says in his attempt at once to discuss and to 
define it, that it denotes "the general name and title under which all Errors, 
Heresies, Blasphemies, and Schisms are united, as Samson's foxes were 
by their tails" (Judges xv. 4). Yet both Edwards and Walker, however 
much scorn they may pour upon Independency or the Independents as 
the men who have "no certain principles save anarchy and the pretended 
new light" — Edwards counts against the Independents 176 distinct 
heresies, and says of his personal knowledge "unto these more might 
be added"; and Walker, who gave fifteen reasons why Independents 
should hate and. depose the King, ended with this: that they who 



OF THE ECCLESIASTIC NEEDED TO BE FREE INDEED I49 

freedom from kings and their courts in States more ancient. 
It was this notion of Independency that created the idea 

"represent but the common people, assumed power to cut him off who 
immediately represented God" — if they have occasion to express the 
idea we have seen to be denoted by " Independent," use the word with- 
out scruple [Antapologia, p. 172). We can see the process by which 
the hatred which in England seems inseparable from civil politics, was 
transferred from the political to the religious domain, where it has abode 
ever since. John Milton, indeed, in defending the English people against 
Salmasius, defends also the Independents from the assaults of his ignor- 
ance ; and he so did it as to formulate the principle which late liberalism 
accepted: "You find fault with our magistrates for admitting such 'a 
common sewer of all sorts of sects. ' Why should they not? It belongs 
to the church to cast them out of the communion of the faithful ; not 
to the magistrate to banish them the country, provided they do not 
offend against the civil laws of the state. Men at first united into civil 
societies, that they might live safely, and enjoy their liberty, without 
being wronged or oppressed ; and that they might live religiously, and 
according to the doctrine of Christianity, they united themselves into 
churches. Civil societies have laws, and churches have a discipline 
peculiar to themselves, and far differing from each other. And this has 
been the occasion of so many wars in Christendom ; to wit, because the 
civil magistrate and the church confounded their jurisdictions." And 
he gives them this high character: "the Independents, as they are 
called, were the only men, that from first to last kept to their point, and 
knew what use to make of their victory." " You say," says he to 
Salmasius, " 'the English and Scots promised by a solemn covenant, to 
preserve the majesty of the king.' But you omit upon what terms they 
promised it ; to wit, if it might consist with the safety of their religion 
and their liberty. To both which, religion and liberty, the king was 
so averse to his last breath, and watched all opportunities of gaining 
advantages upon them, that it was evident that his life was dangerous 
to their religion, and the certain ruin of their liberty." But Milton's 
" Areopagitica : a speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing," is the 
noblest expression in our language of the idea the term " Independent" 
denoted. John Locke, too, after quoting Filmer and Hooker as to their 
use of "Independent," explains it by the term "liberty," and argues 
that "the state of nature" is in letters an abstract thing which can only 
be understood as the antecedent of the present state of society, and which 
is governed by the same principles as governed the earlier or younger 
society, just as history has to do with men who once were infants, and 
who must be supposed to have grown as healthy children iAto men by 
obedience to known physical laws. This history of the idea is offered as 
a justification of the statement in the text, not as a contribution to a 
special field of ecclesiastical history. 



150 POLITICAL FREEDOM AND FREE CITIES. 

of toleration and achieved religious liberty in England. 
Political freedom was the creation of free cities, where the 
citizens exercised the rights and fulfilled with holy zeal the 
duties of free men ; but centralized States tend ever to be- 
come despotisms. All empires organized into uniformity 
and disciplined for conquest have been repressive of free- 
dom, and promotive of manifold tyrannies. Athens free was 
the mother of genius and art, heroism and devotion; but 
Athens enslaved was the home of inflated rhetoric and 
sophistical disputation. And so ecclesiastical polities that 
build congregations into a corporate system, or a uniform 
and centralized body-politic, must be intolerant; to allow 
difference is to foster division, which means death. But the 
polity which declares each congregation free, a city as it 
were, constituted by free men, able to make and administer 
its laws, secure in their ancient privileges and inalienable 
rights, is a polity that must be tolerant. The spirit that 
abolished difference and imposed uniformity would pro- 
nounce the doom of freedom. Yet independency is not 
isolation; toleration of difference is not indifference to 
truth. Free cities have known how to associate freedom 
and fellowship; and churches know how to combine inde- 
pendency and unity, how to make men live together as 
brethren, and yet be to each other as the freeborn. They 
love to be independent of the State that they may the 
better serve the State; and they are churches that they 
may develop within and between themselves a richer, 
manlier, kindlier Christian brotherhood. 



ECCLESIASTICAL POLITY AND FREE CHURCHES 15I 

II 

The ecclesiastical polities which, especially as forms of 
practical and applied thought, have ever been more divisive 
than speculative doctrines, may, if the New Testament be 
taken as the source and standard, be represented as either 
autocracies or episcopacies, as either presbyterian or com- 
munal. 

I. The autocracies may have either a civil face like the 
Russo-Greek Church, which is, as it were, the survivor of 
the Eastern Empire, and which is the nearest thing still 
alive to the old relation of religion to the State; or an 
ecclesiastical face like the Roman Catholic Church, which is, 
we may say, an empire transformed into a church, with the 
Pope as the successor of Caesar, securely seated in the city 
that gave to the empire, as it gives to the church, its name. 
In both these cases the reign is nominally rather than really 
personal; for the Russian Emperor has his cabinet of 
councillors and the Pope his curia, whose advice both rulers 
must follow or perish. We are here mainly concerned 
with the Pope and the curia, and would but remark that 
the church must undergo many a radical change before it 
can be conceived as one in the Roman sense, or as finding 
its spokesman in one man it does not elect. 

2. Episcopal authority, which implies a similar idea of 
unity, though on a smaller scale, to what is found in the 
papal church, is not possible where the flock is headless; 
it has been trained to obey and cannot otherwise follow. 
An episcopal constitution speaks, therefore, of a single 
head, which if the body be an ecclesia must be an ecclesias- 
tic, while if the church be a state must be the king. Of 
the first type, the church of Rome is an example; of the 
second the church of England. And of the civil who were 



152 THE IDEA OF UNITY, ROMAN AND EPISCOPAL. 

also its religious rulers, the English Church has had but two, 
Henry and Elizabeth, who were both Tudors. James I was 
by birth and education, and possibly also by conviction, a 
Presbyterian, who never even in England ceased to be a 
Scot, and read the English dissenter through the stock he 
himself came of. His son, Charles I, was the same; his 
grandson, Charles H, was the most dangerous of the race, 
partly because he wasacrypto-Catholic, and partly because 
he was without convictions. The other grandson, James 1 1 , 
was less dangerous, because while as shameless a sinner as 
his brother, he was a man with convictions ; and so he was 
no crypto-Catholic, but as one open and avowed he threw 
away his throne rather than surrender his creed. William 
never became at heart either English or episcopal, while 
Anne needed but a year of life to restore the Stuart dynasty. 
What the Hanoverians are we all know, and can say, that 
so far as they have been religious, their heart is more Presby- 
terian than episcopal. For a church then to be ruled by 
bishops signifies that it ought to be one ; but that it may be 
Catholic there must be a head, an ecclesiastic who presides 
over the ecclesia and can both speak and act in its name 
and behalf. Where the Church is the State and therefore 
national, its head must be civil or simply the king. Should 
the idea of unity in the church be statutory, it cannot be 
realized otherwise than as imposed by statute or the legis- 
lature. As a step towards proving how the Papacy or 
Episcopacy arises, there must be proof of the approximation 
in idea of the Church to the State, or the rise of the notion 
of unity, which is in its outward form necessary to the 
State, though superfluous to the Church. 

3. The Presbyterian polity is simply the rule or gov- 
ernment of elders. It is more Biblical than either of 
those we have before considered ; and it is more natural. 



MILTON AT FIRST A PRESBYTERIAN 153 

as years produce the experience that statecraft reckons 
wisdom. We have, therefore, the ''elders," who presided 
over the Jewish community stealing out of Judaism into 
the Christian church. It is a small matter that the clergy 
were for centuries known by another name than presbyters ; 
any term old enough to be recorded in the New Testament 
has in the matter of age a sufficient respectability. And 
this respectability Presbytery can claim whatever may be 
asserted of the systems already described. We can here 
listen to what John Milton says: "So long as the church, 
in true imitation of Christ, can be content to ride upon an 
ass, carrying herself and her government along in a mean 
and simple guise, she may be, as he is, a lion of the tribe 
of Judah ; and in her humility all men with loud hosannas 
will confess her greatness. But when despising the mighty 
operation of the spirit by the weak things of this world, 
she thinks to make herself bigger and more considerable, 
by using the way of civil force and jurisdiction, as she sits 
upon this lion she changes into an ass, and instead of 
hosannas every man pelts her with stones and dirt."* And 
now I have quoted him, let me quote him again, especially 
as to his confession of faith in Presbytery : ' ' I fear lest 
any crookedness, any wrinkle or spot should be found in 
presbyterian government. If Bodin, the famous French 
writer, though a papist, yet affirms the commonwealth 
which maintains this discipline will certainly flourish in 
virtue and piety, I dare assure myself, that every true 
protestant will admire the integrity, the uprightness, the 
divine and gracious purposes thereof, and even for the 
reason of it so coherent with the doctrine of the gospel, 
beside the evidence of command in Scripture, will confess 
it to be the only true Church-government, "f So much did 

* Reason of Church Government, Book II, c. iii. f Ibid. 



154 MILTON BECOMES AN INDEPENDENT. 

he feel its value that he breaks forth in the first book 
he wrote after his return from Italy into an apostrophe 
to the ' two peoples, English and Scotch : * ' Go on 
both hand in hand, O nations, never to be disunited; 
be the praise and the heroic song of all posterity; 
merit this, but seek only virtue, not to extend your 
limits; (for what needs to win a fading triumphant 
laurel out of the tears of wretched men?) but to settle 
the pure worship of God in his church, and justice in the 
state ; then shall the hardest difficulties smooth out them- 
selves before ye; envy shall sink to hell, craft and malice 
be confounded, whether it be homebred mischief or out- 
landish cunning; yea, other nations will then covet to 
serve ye, for lordship and victory are but the pages of 
justice and virtue. Commit securely to true wisdom the 
vanquishing and uneasing of craft and subtlety, which 
are but her two runagates; join your invincible might to 
do worthy and godlike deeds; and then he that seeks to 
break your union, a cleaving curse be his inheritance to all 
generations."* Milton changed, we know, and became one 
of the most active as well as vehement of Independents. 
Why? The action which changed him we know from his 
works; but all we have to do here is simply to note the 
fact of change, for Milton did not always continue in the same 
mind with which he had begun. This is a fact recognized by 
the greatest of his biographers, who like Milton at the outset 
was a genuine presbyterian, and what he was at first 
he remained throughout. He taught many to see what he 
himself saw clearly, that Presbytery was wise in the early 
years of the Commonwealth, that victory made it foolish 
and unwise, and that in nothing was it more beside itself 
than in standing by ''shallow" Edwards against toleration 

* Cf. Reformation, Book II. 



THE COMMUNAL POLITY 155 

and everything on which Milton had set his heart. This 
is a purely historical fact, and as such it is stated and em- 
phasized. 

4. The polity termed "communal" is one which lays 
stress on the common man, who has ceased to be common 
by undergoing conversion and being incorporated with 
Christ. What it means and implies every person who 
studies this paper will understand. 



Ill 

I . The polity, then, these correlative and complementary 
terms denote is the polity which is to be here discussed. 
But before we can do so we must determine some stand- 
ard of comparison, by which the polity must be judged 
as regards its truth on the one hand, and its practical 
worth on the other. On this point our first, which is 
also our last, principle is plain enough; the polity of 
a church must be judged, not simply from the standpoint 
of the church, whether it be a body which boasts an ancient 
and continuous history, or a young society organized on 
the basis of common beliefs; but from the standpoint, 
on the one hand, of the religion in its purest and most 
primitive form, and, on the other, of the ends, whether 
proximate or ultimate, the religion was intended to realize. 
The religion of Christ existed before any Christian church. 
All churches exist by virtue of the religion, while the religion 
exists by virtue of no church. And an ecclesiastical 
polity has its worth and place determined by its relation 
to the religion. The political ideal can be good only as it 
reflects and articulates the religious ideal. The best polity 
for a church as an aggressive or proselytizing, or as a political 
and ambitious society, may be the worst for the religion 



156 CHURCH POLITIES MONARCHICAL OR REPUBLICAN. 

as a series of Divine truths and principles, facts and doc- 
trines, creating and governing the moral and spiritual 
life of man. The system that best satisfies the notion of 
commercial utility or political convenience may be most 
disastrous to the faith that works by love towards perfect 
obedience. If the Churches of Christ exist for the religion 
of Christ, then their polities must be looked at through 
its nature and ends, spirit and purpose. The polity that 
best interprets and realizes these is the best church polity. 
2 . Church polities, which correspond to the names already 
described, may be divided into two great classes — the 
Monarchical and the Republican, each being capable 
of further subdivision. The Monarchical, which is not 
considered here relative to any civil sovereignty, is either 
absolute = papal, or limited = episcopal, understood as a 
system not terminating in a Papacy. The one is simply an 
autocracy, or organized and absolute patriarchate, while 
the other is constitutional, or a sovereignty qualified by 
law. The Republican is either oligarchical = Presbyterian, 
or democratic = communal. The former is governed by 
and through its elect, the men who as ministers or elders 
are its ruling spiritual aristocracy, but the latter is more 
jealous of delegated powers, loving to act in a body and as 
a whole, that all may, by exercising high functions, learn 
high things. 

IV 

These, then, are the polities we have to study, and to 
study from the standpoint of the religion and religious 
ideal of Christ and His apostles. We are not specifically con- 
cerned with the bodies that profess these polities, with their 
statistics, histories, modes of proof, methods of vindicating 
their right to be and to be believed as of Divine institu- 



PAPAL POLITY AND THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION 157 

tion and authority. Our work is at once simpler and more 
radical ; it is to bring these polities and the religious ideals 
— personal, civil, and social — which they imply and en- 
force, face to face with the mind, purpose, and method of 
Christ and the men He directly formed and inspired. The 
most convenient point at which to begin the comparison 
is that supplied by the most highly developed and finely 
articulated polity — the papal ; and the convenience of 
beginning here is the greater, as the only points on which 
we care to insist are those it has in common with the more 
modified form of the Monarchical type — the episcopal, 
specifically the Anglican. 

I. The contrast of Catholicism with the Christianity of 
Christ is apparent enough. There is nothing that so 
radically affects and determines alike the doctrine, ethics, 
and politics of a religion as its relation to what may be 
termed the sacerdotal element or idea. Now the Catholic 
is a system constituted and administered by a priesthood, 
devoted to ritual, jealous of its prerogatives, made by an 
enforced celibacy to feel, as it were, homeless, with all 
their home affections absorbed by the Church; so graded, 
drilled, and organized that they form, as Adam Smith 
said, "A sort of spiritual army, dispersed in different 
quarters, indeed, but of which all the movements can be 
directed by one head, and conducted upon one uniform 
plan." * And this priesthood claims to be necessary to the 
worship of God ; and it claims also to have the right to hear 
confession, to grant absolution, to celebrate mass, to give or 
withhold the sacraments, to open or shut the gate of the 
church, which is to them and theirs the door of the kingdom 
of heaven. The priest stands between man and God, a 
mediator, a person who seeks to control the world, that is, by 

* Wealth of Nations, bk. v, cap. i. 



158 PAPAL RELIGION HAS A PRIESTHOOD, 

his power over the world to come. But of all this there is 
in the New Testament absolutely no trace. Jesus Himself 
was no priest, was without priestly ancestry or associates,* 
adopted no sacerdotal custom, chose no sacerdotal person, 
had no relations, save those of antagonism, to the priest- 
hood, and the one thing it gave Him was the honour of its 
hate and the glorious infamy of the Cross. Nor did He 
institute any priestly order. No one of His apostles was 
a priest, or exercised a single priestly function, or uttered 
a word that hinted at actual or possible priestly claims. 
The terms they used to denote the offices they held or 
instituted express or imply no single sacerdotal element 
or idea. The men who are charged to represent and ad- 
minister the new faith are named prophets, or apostles, or 
evangelists, or pastors, or teachers,! or overseers, f or 
elders, § or ministers, 1 1 or deacons, If but never priests. And 
this is a most remarkable thing, explicable only as the 
result of most careful and conscious purpose, the more that 
Christianity stood alone amid the great religions of the 
time. For the worship of Christ's day was steeped in 
sacerdotalism ; all its great acts and instruments and agents 
bore sacerdotal names, and were beset with associations and 
fixed in a system sacerdotal through and through. To 
institute a polity that had not even a reminiscence of the 
actual sacerdotalism, where everything priestly was so 
transfigured into its spiritual opposite as to be only the 
more completely annulled, to appoint to religious or spirit- 

* Cf. Heb. vii. 11 ff., where Jesus indeed is said to be a priest, but after 
" the order of Melchizedek," not of Aaron, to whom he is set in opposition. 
Cf. vv. 14, 24, 28 (see Infra). 

f Ephes. iv. 11. 

+ Acts XX. 28 ; I Tim. iii. 1,2; i Peter ii. 25. 

§ Acts xi. 30 ; xiv. 23 ; xv. 4 ; i Tim. v. 12; Tit. i. 5. 

II Acts xiii. 5 ; Rom. xv. 16 ; Eph. iii. 7 ; i Tim. ix. 6. 

^ Phil. i. I ; I Tim. iii. 8, 10, 12, 13. 



BUT CHRIST, ACCORDING TO THE FLESH, IS NO PRIEST 159 

ual offices that had in name no hint, in functions no shadowi- 
est remembrance of the ancient priesthoods, impHes so 
studious and complete a rejection of all they signified in 
religious politics as to be demonstrative proof that they 
had not, and were meant never more to have, any place in 
the Christian system. 

In this respect, then, the religion of Christ was an abso- 
lutely new thing ; it stood alone among the religions of the 
world. The notion of a spiritual worship — a pure rrioral 
obedience, a service of God by clean hands and pure hearts, 
a religion without priests, or temple, or sacrifices, or ap- 
pointed seasons ; but with the truths these symbolize, real- 
ized in the spirit and expressed in the conduct — had been 
conceived by the Hebrew prophets.* But in them it existed 
as an ideal, by Christ it was transformed into a reality. He 
fulfilled the law and the prophets, translated what they 
prefigured and predicted into fact, instituted a worship 
that abolished the temple and all its childish symbolism, 
and taught man to adore God by obeying Him in spirit 
and in truth. f And so on the religion of Christ no shadow 
of sacerdotalism rests; its face is radiant with pure and 
noble spirituality, t By what is simply the most remarkable 
and perfect revolution in history, because the most com- 
pletely worked by the wisdom and providence of God, the 
new religion issued in spotless spirituality from the bosom 
of what was then the most elaborate and selfish sacerdo- 
talism in the world. One book, indeed, in the New Tes- 
tament — the Epistle to the Hebrews — attributes priest- 
hood to Christ,! but it does so with the most significant 

* Ex. XX. 1-17; Deut. V. 6-21; Ps. xxiv. 4; Isa. i. 11-17; Micah vi. 
6-8. 

t Rosea vi. 6; Matt. ix. 13; xii. 7. 

I John iv. 32. 

§ Heb. ii. 17; iv. 15. 



l6o HIS PRIESTHOOD. IN HEBREWS. FROM CHRIST'S MIND 

limitations, (a) He stands in contrast to the Old Tes- 
tament priesthood, has a special sacrifice to offer in 
nature different from the Mass, and a service of His 
own.* (/3) His priestly life is heavenly, not earthly, the 
exercise of His sacerdotal functions beginning only with- 
in the veil ; f and (7) He is the one priest. He stands alone 
in His office and work consecrated by the oath of 
God.J He is Priest, not after the Levitical type, but 
after its very antithesis, its radical contrast, "the order 
of Melchizedek" ; § and so not only priest and king in one 
— ethical in both relations, creating by the one peace, work- 
ing through the other righteousness — but the only priest, 
constituting the order in which He stands, without another 
either beneath Him or by His side. The religion of 
Christ, save as regards Himself, is, therefore, in the 
most absolute sense, a priestless religion, all the more 
so that a royal priesthood is ascribed to the collective 
society or universal Christian man.|| Where all men, 
by virtue of their faith and common brotherhood in 
Christ, become priests as He is Priest, the priesthood 
has ceased to be an office or an order, and become the 
synonym of Christian manhood, the symbol of the great 
truth that the reign of official mediators is over, that man 
and God are now intended to stand face to face as Father 
and Son. Spiritual worship means immediacy of spiritual 
relation, and without this immediacy the relation could 
not be paternal on God's side or filial on man's. Men who 
are under the sacerdotal law are slaves or babes, not sons. If 

♦ Heb. vii. 26-28; viii. $-6; ix. 11, 24-26. 
f iv. 15 ; vii. 16-17; viii. i, 4; ix. n. 
X vii. 17, 21 ; X. 21. 
§ Heb. V. 6, 10 ; vi. 20 ; vii. 1-3. 
II I Peter ii. 9 ; Rev. i. 6 ; v. 10 ; xx. 6. 
T[ Gal. iv. 1-7 ; Heb. v. 12, 13. 



POLITY AND PRIESTHOOD ARE ALIKE ABSENT l6l 

Where the spirit of the Son is there is freedom from the 
priesthood that there may be fellowship with the Father. 
The abolition of sacerdotalism was thus necessary to the 
purpose and mind of Christ; it was the very respect in 
which His religion transcended all others that made it and 
required it to be a religion without priests. 

2. But the distinctive political as well as sacerdotal 
elements of Catholicism, whether Roman or Anglican, do 
not exist in the Christianity of Christ and His apostles. 
The very conditions of its existence are absent; for the 
primitive church is no unity in the Roman sense, and 
it knows no primacy. Its societies are not organized 
into a single body politic, nor are they subordinated to 
a single head. There is no statutory authority to bring 
the churches together, nor has any assembly met to appoint 
any one to act as a representative. There are the most 
marked diversities in custom and practice, the most 
remarkable differences in policy and method. The Jews 
and Greeks do not readily coalesce; the former stand on 
immemorial privileges and rites, the latter on their newly- 
won liberty. Paul and the "pillar apostles"* have differ- 
ent provinces, which are not geographical but ethnical; 
he will not allow them to invade his freedom, nor will they 
enforce his liberty in the churches of Judaea. There is 
nothing he so severely condemns as the attempt to invoke 
the authority of certain potent names ; to swear by Cephas 
is to renounce Christ. f But while no system could be less 
uniform, none could be more fraternal. Paul writes to 
many churches, and many churches confess him their 
founder and teacher; but his letters are expository or 

* There is a touch of irony in Paul's reference to those held in repute as 
pillars (oi doKovvres <tt{)\ol elvaC); ''those who seemed to be pillars" is a deli- 
cate hint that the men referred to, " James, Cephas, and John," were not what 
they seemed. t i Cor. i. 12, 13; iii. 1-7. 

M 



l62 UNITY OF FAITH AND ORGANIZED UNIFORMITY DIFFER. 

expostulatory, hortatory or biographical, and as far as 
possible from speaking with legal or political authority. 
No man ever had a doctrinal system so carefully articu- 
lated, or laboured more to make it intelligible and credible 
to the societies he formed; yet no man ever so carefully 
avoided building the societies he erected at Galatia and 
Rome, Ephesusand Colossae, Philippiand Thessalonica, Co- 
rinth and Athens, into a political corporation. His unity of 
the faith did not mean organized uniformity. And the same 
is true of the other apostolic writers. The only New Testa- 
ment book that seems to dream of the church as a visible 
and localized State is the Apocalypse, and the city of God is 
to it not Rome, but Jerusalem. Rome, indeed , is the unholy 
city, drunk with the blood of the saints, memorable as the 
scene of apostolic martyrdoms, not of apostolic rule.* 

V 

I . I nto the question as to the constitution and offices of the 
Apostolic Church it is at present impossible and unnecessary 
to enter. The positions our fathers affirmed are now coming 
to be accepted commonplaces. English scholarship, broad- 
ened and illumined by German, which here means Protestant, 
is becoming too critical in spirit and historical in method to 
spare the old high Anglican doctrines. Cultivated preju- 
dice is, indeed, always most inveterate, dies the hardest, and 
is bitterest in its death; but a death through more light 
ought to be an ideal euthanasia. It is a rare thing to find 
scientific criticism in a Bampton Lecture, still rarer to find it 
used for a really scientific purpose, especially when that pur- 
pose may be described as the proof of a thesis which has been 
a commonplace with us for generations. f But even more 

* Rev. xvii. 5, 6. 

t The Organization of the Early Christian Churches. By Edwin Hatch, m.a. 
The Bampton Lectures for 1880. This is a very happy, and, on the whole, 



BAMPTON LECTURES " 1 63 

significant of the change in EngHsh scholarship, because 
proceeding from the most typical and the most influential 

fairly successful attempt to deal with a deeply interesting problem. We 
cannot but admire its fine analytical qualities, its delicate apprecia- 
tion of the various forces at work, and the true sense for history and 
historical movement that pervades it. He uses very lucidly and success- 
fully the results of the later researches into the guilds and associations, 
secret or other, of the first century, to illustrate the offices and constitution 
of the primitive Church, though it strikes us that Mr. Hatch is here, 
where he is most independent and suggestive, tempted to exaggerate 
their influence, and to underrate or unduly overlook the larger and nobler 
influence of the political idea that comes from the free cities of Greece, an 
idea expressed in the cardinal and determinative terms irdXis and iKK\rja-ia. 
Yet the book is a healthy one, and will help to set the questions it dis- 
cusses in a fresh light before the Anglican as distinguished from the English 
student. But we must regret some very serious omissions in Mr. Hatch's 
lectures, especially his very brief allusion to the vital matter of the sacer- 
dotal order and system that so soon grew up in the Early Church, and the 
inadequacy of his critical and literary discussions. These omissions seem 
to us connected with a failure on Mr. Hatch's part rightly to appreciate 
the various organizing forces at work in their organic unity and move- 
ment ; and so the reader is not made to perceive the action of these 
forces on the religion, or their reflection in the literature, with its varying 
tendencies, and local and temporal differences. The organization of the 
Christian Church worked a revolution in the Christian religion. 

[After a good deal of mental hesitation the above footnote has been 
allowed to stand as it was first written. In his later years Edwin Hatch 
was one of my most intimate friends — a friendship, if I mistake not, begun 
the very year (1882) the above note was written, though before it was 
published — and the image of him looks down from the mantelpiece upon 
my desk. He had been in Germany, where he found his work much 
appreciated ; for he was too impartial and had too much of the rigorous 
conscience of the scholar to be thoroughly appreciated at home, where 
the present Bishop of Birmingham had, amid much applause, assailed the 
Bamptons with all a young man's courage and more than a young man's 
confidence. There Hatch had found a German friend I also knew. The 
result was his Bampton Lectures were translated into German ; and the 
theory known in Germany — against, indeed, the will of the man who is 
bracketed with the Englishman — as " the Hatch and Harnack hypothesis " 
took shape and was gravely and learnedly discussed. Harnack appended to 
the translation an important note (pp. 229-59), mainly intended to confirm 
the argument and elucidate the illustrations of Lectures II, III, and IV. 
The note emphasized Hatch's knowledge, the insight based on it, and the 
fact that the offices and functions of the church could best be explained 
and understood by setting the Christian society back amid the institutions 



164 BP. LIGHTFOOT'S essay on " THE CHRISTIAN MINISTRY." 

of living Anglican scholars, was Dr. Lightfoot's essay on 
''The Christian Ministry."* It is as honourable to his 
candour as to his scholarship, especially as regards the 
discussions as to the constitution of the apostolic and 
sub-apostolic church, j His later discussions as to the 
rise and growth of the episcopate, though marked by a 
laborious attempt to be impartial and moderate, are often 
weakened by strained interpretations. He frequently puts 
modern ideas into ancient terms, uses conjecture for evi- 
dence, and cunningly draws from a late document the 
testimonies he needs. When, e.g. he describes t James, ''the 
Lord's brother," as the earliest bishop, or, to quote him 
exactly, "as a bishop in the later and more special sense of 
the term," § he goes not only beyond, but against the evi- 
dence contained in the New Testament, and in his other 
authority, Josephus.|| The evidence may be instructively 

of the time. This was the supreme gift, which will abide when other 
things have failed, of Edwin Hatch to his time. He was a master of 
method ; and his method is to us significant. It may be a small thing to 
prove that the Bishop was an evolved treasurer of a religious guild ; but 
it is something to know how best to conceive and explain the church. 
We do not think the organization and order of the church can be histori- 
cally understood unless we look at it through the mstitutions of its day.] 

* Epistle to the Philippians, pp. 179-269. 4th ed. 

f The second phrase is intended as a name for the age succeeding that 
of the apostles, and the nomenclature of that age is, as Principal, Sir 
James Donaldson says, "objectionable" (The Apost. Fathers, p. loi). 

X Epistle to the Philippians, p. 197. 

§ What does Dr. Lightfoot mean when he speaks as he does here of "a 
bishop in the later and more special sense of the term ? " Is the bishopric 
territorial ? If it is so, then who gave him his diocese at first ? Or can 
such things be done in secret ? We who are Scots by nature as well as 
by nation, know that the men of lona had bishops who had no territorial 
jurisdiction or territorial designation. 

II Antiquities xx, 9, i. There is an enormous mass of literature con- 
nected with the reference in Josephus to James, "the Brother of our 
Lord." There is controversy about what Josephus really said, the state 
of his text being suspicious wherever it refers to the person, the religion, 
or the kinsmen of our Saviour. There are three references in Origen : 



WAS JAMES THE BISHOP OF THE CHURCH AT JERUSALEM? 165 

studied in the proof texts, which are finely suggestive 
of the ingenuity needed to discover in them any re- 
motest hint of episcopal dignity or authority.* Dr. 
Lightfoot does not explain how it happened that this 
earliest bishop loses his episcopal functions at the most 
critical moment, and is not even named in connection 
with the most formal and solemn act of the Church at 
Jerusalem. It is **to the apostles and presbyters with the 
whole church" that it '* seemed good" to choose men 
"out of the company"! to go to Antioch with Paul 
and Barnabas; and it is the same apostles and pres- 
byters who send the letter to the brethren of the 
Gentiles in Antioch and Syria and Cilicia.J It is 
not without meaning, too, that Paul, when he first 
goes up to Jerusalem, goes up to visit Cephas,! who is 
evidently a person more important to Paul than ''the 
earhest bishop," though he was "the Lord's brother." 
Again: when Dr. Lightfoot says,|| "as early as the middle 
of the second century all parties concur in representing him 
as a bishop in the strict sense of the term," he does not 
quite correctly represent the historical significance of his 
authorities. Does he mean to affirm that the bishop was 
then what he is now? If we doubt or even deny it, it is 
because we are pupils who have learned of Dr. Lightfoot. 
Then what does he mean by including " the canonical 
Scriptures," especially "the Epistles of Paul" and "the 
Acts of the Apostles" in his list of authorities ? There 
are only three possible references to James the Lord's 

one in the Homilies, Matt. xiii. 15, other two in the Contra Celsum, i, 47 ; 
ii, 13; and Eusebius is, as he usually is, credulous and uncritical ; yet 
cf. Hist. Eccles. ii, 23. There is a careful notice in the Ars Critica, Part 
III, § I, c. xiv, of Clericus, and in Koessing's Dissertatio, 1857. 

* Gal. ii. 9; Acts xii. 17; xv. i3ff. ; xxi. 18. f Acts xv. 22, 

X Acts XV. 23-29. § Gal. i. 18. j| p. 208. 



1 66 APOSTOLIC CONSTITUTIONS, CLEMENT OF ALEXANDRIA. 

brother in the Acts,* and but one more in the Pauline 
Epistles ; f and in no text is he spoken of as a person 
in lawful authority. Then the other authorities are as 
bad ; they are Hegesippus, as quoted by Eusebius, the 
Clementines, Clemens Alexandrinus, also as quoted by 
Eusebius, and the Apostolic Constitutions. We begin 
at the end, and say the last is rather a curious 
authority, which one would have thought impossible, 
especially when it is made to speak as to the middle of the 
second century. Clement's literary activity falls at the 
end of the century, his birth about the middle. And 
Dr. Lightfoot does not tell us that Clement's notion of 
the bishop was by no means the episcopal or church 
notion. He does not think of the man as made 
*'just" by his office, but as placed in it by the church 
because "just." His great man was not the eVtWoTro?, 
but the yv(0(TTLf€6<^ ; the latter was fit to be enrolled e/? rrjv 
i/cXoryr]v tcov aTToaroXwv. % And this was entirely in harmony 
with the faith and order of the then Alexandrian church, 
where the head of the catechetical school, who stood in the 
true apostolical succession, was a greater man than the 
bishop. Dr. Lightfoot's other two authorities are in reality 
one, and the one is for purposes of proof worse than none. 
The ultimate authority is the Clementines, and they are not 
simply "gross exaggerations," but fictions, written with a 
doctrinal purpose which could be fulfilled only through an 
episcopate which magnified James; § Hegesippus quite 

* Acts xii. 17. It is a little more than doubtful whether this is 
"James, the Lord's brother"; xv. 13; xxi. 18. 

f I Cor, XV. 7; Gal. i. 19; ii. 9, 12. 

X Stromata, iv, 31 ; vi, 13. 

§ The Clementines, both Homilies and Recognitions, have been well 
described as a religious "Romance" which no one would cite as an 
authentic witness. I wish it were possible to say that it is the first 
or the last writing of its type; yet its place in early Christian 



HEGESIPPUS AND THE CLEMENTINE LITERATURE 167 

evidently echoes in his fragments the Ebionitic tradition 
which has its perfected form in the Clementines.* And 
there are certain peculiarities of the tradition Dr. Lightfoot 
either overlooks or does not sufficiently emphasize. It 
embodies elements and stories most certainly mythical. 
It would be most interesting to know whether Dr. Lightfoot 
accepts the account of James's personal habits, or the still 
more extraordinary story as to his death, his being cast 
down from the wing of the temple and stoned — a deed 
said to be done by ' ' the Scribes and Pharisees ' ' ; while 
the more historical Josephus attributes the death to Annas, 
the chief priest, and the Sadducees. Then the position of 
James in the Church at Jerusalem differs radically from 
the traditional and customary episcopal one. He holds, it 

literature can be ascertained and fixed. Like all documents connected 
with the formation of the primitive church, it owes much to Baur and 
his school. He has treated it as what it unquestionably is, a product of 
Judeo-Christian thought, and as intended to commend it and the organ- 
ization it requires. It is embraced in one of his early programmes, which 
deals with the origin and doctrine of the Ebionites or Jewish Christians ; 
in the famous discussion, which may be said to have founded his school, 
on the Christus-Partie in Corinth ; in his treatise on the Manichgean 
Religious System; in his Die Chrisfliche Gnosis, a whole chapter — pp. 
300-414 — is dedicated to the discussion of what is termed the "Pseudo- 
Clementine System." He returns to the subject in his Paul the Apostle, 
and in the first volume of his Kirchengeschichte. The question he did 
not discuss was one in pure literature, whether the Homilies or the 
Recognitions was the prior; and here I may confess myself a 
follower of Hilgenfeld, who here opposed the cleverest member of the 
Tubingen school, at any rate after its master and founder, and held 
that the Recognitions were earlier than the Homilies. Ritschl sees 
in the "Recognitions" an evidence of the richness of Judaism, which 
supplied more than one element to the creation of Christianity {Entstehung 
d&r Alt-kath. Kirche, I30ff, 448 ff). While the book was throughout 
heretical, it is yet, through its apotheosis of Peter, a main source of 
Catholic tradition. 

* If Lightfoot had had more of the serpent and less of the dove in 
him, he would have kept clear himself of the Clementine literature and 
laboured to save from it a writer like Hegesippus. Possibly his qualities 
were too dove-like for the partisans of his own communion. 



l68 EPISCOPACY BY DIVINE RIGHT IS DEAD. 

not as an apostle or a successor of the apostles, but as a 
kinsman of the Lord, and his successor is appointed on 
the same grounds. His case supplies no parallel to the 
historical episcopate, and his office, if office it can be called, , 
can in no respect be traced back to any institutive act 
either of Christ or His apostles.* 

2. We may say, then, the Divine right of episcopacy is 
dead; it died of the light created by historical criticism. 
It is open to no manner of doubt that the modern bishop 
has no place in the New Testament. The same office, 
according to the aspect in which it was viewed, was vari- 
ously designated,! bishops and presbyters were identical,! 
and one church might have many bishops or presbyters, 
just as it might have many deacons. § Each church was 
a brotherhood; supremacy over it was conceded to no 
man. Government, indeed, existed, order was enforced, 
but the men who ruled were the men who served, and the 
church was in all matters of judgment and discipline the 
ultimate authority. 1 1 The apostolic is the simplest and 
least organized of societies; a society where the freedom 
of the Spirit is largely loved and its gifts highly esteemed, 
where official clergy are unknown and the man who can 

* It may be thought I, who was a young man when the text was 
written, too freely passed judgment in a prior note on the Bishop of Bir- 
mingham for his criticism of Hatch's Bampton Lectures (p. 163). Let me 
at once frankly confess a kindred sin, and say I feel ashamed of the way 
in which Lightfoot is here treated. I can only plead in extenuation that 
Lightfoot had not then published his great work which put him in the 
front rank of modern scholars, on Ignatius and the Ignatian Epistles. 
And I am not alone in the judgment passed on Lightfoot's work. 

•)• irpoLffTdfievoL, I Thess. V. 12 ; Rom. xii, 8 ; irpea^vTepoi, Acts xi. 30 ; xiv. 
23 ; XV. 2 ff., etc. ; iTriaKoiroL, Phil. i. i; iroifxhes, Eph. iv. 11 ; riyovixevot, 
Heb. xiii. 7, 17, 24. 

X I Tim. iii. 1-2 ; cf. v. 17 ; Titus i. 5-7 ; i Peter v. 1-2 ; Acts xx. t7 
18, 20. 

§ Phn. i. I. 

II Cf. I Cor. V. 3-5 ; 2 Cor. ii. 5 ff. 



THE POLITY OF THE PRIMITIVE CHURCHES 1 69 

teach is free to speak,* and the man most honoured is the 
man who most loves. There is no primate in any church ; 
even the apostles do not claim an administrative and 
executive authority above and apart from the churches. t 
Discipline is to be exercised as in the presence of the apostle 
and in the name of the Lord, but by the collective and 
collected society. { The liberty they enjoy in Christ is 
inalienable, and to be Christ's is to be introduced into a 
brotherhood too real and too spontaneous to accept the 
bondage of any officialism, however consecrated or en- 
dowed. 

The primacy which thus in the apostolic age belonged 
to no man, or city, or church, is even more completely 
absent from the mind and speech of Christ. His most 
familiar idea is the kingdom. His least familiar the church. 
The society he institutes is a kingdom ; ' ' called of Heaven, ' ' 
in opposition to the empires of earth, the secular mon- 
archies that lived by violence and grew by conquest; called 
"of God," in opposition to the kingdom of darkness or the 
devil, the reign of evil in and over man. But though He 
institutes. He does not organize His kingdom, speaks of it 
rather as incapable of organization, appoints no viceroys, 
governors, or officers; simply proclaims the truths and 
laws that are to create the reign of God in the heart of 
man. The term church He uses only twice; once in 
what may be^ named its individual sense, as denotive of 
a single assembly or constituted congregation,! and once 
in the more universal sense, as denotive of His collective 
society. 1 1 It is only by the most violent exegesis that this 
latter can be made to seem to promise preeminence to 

* Acts viii. 4; xi. 19-21; i Cor. xiv; Rom. xii. 6-8. 
t Acts vi. 3-6. J I Cor. v. 3-5. 

§ Matt, xviii. 17. || Ihid., xvi. 18. 



lyo THE SACERDOTAL AND POLITICAL IDEALS IN CONFLICT WITH 

Peter; but if it did, what then? It can in no way help 
the claims of Catholicism ; for there is no proof that the 
promise had any reference to Peter's successors, no proof 
that Peter had any successors, absolutely none that they 
are the popes of Rome.* 

VI 

The question as to the social ideal here rises : Has 
Christianity any ideal for society? If so, what is it? 
and does it harmonize with those ideals we have classed 
as religious and political, and already discussed ? 

I. To discuss it even in the inadequate fashion which is 
alone possible here may lead us into the province of ethics, 
with all its bottomless quagmire of problems; yet, whatever 
may be the relations of theology and ethics, we know, on 
the authority of Mr. Matthew Arnold, that religion with- 
out morality is inconceivable. Now, religion has a double 
significance for morals: {a) the individuals who profess it 
must have, as moral men, ethical natures, {h) As the indi- 
viduals are, so must the society they constitute be; the 
society and the individual must correspond, and without 
an ethical ideal alike fail of their end. In this region the 
real has its feet on a fact — the Christian religion could not 
have been apart from Judaism. Its prior history and the 
history of the people of Israel are one ; what Judaism was 
Christianity became, with an idea in its heart both religious 
and social. The social idea in Judaism is, indeed, one with 
the religion, which is a fact the Mosaic law witnesses to. 
In this law the distinction between the moral and cere- 
monial is more than a distinction between laws. What is 

* One has only to turn to the Recognitions, iii. 66, to see how much 
Catholicism owes to the Clementines, and how miraculous an atmosphere 
Peter lives in. As to actual miracles, see x. lo. 



THE social; moral and ceremonial law in JUDAISM 171 

called moral is intended for man ; what is called ceremonial 
is intended for a special class, the priesthood. We thus find 
one law faced by another, which are thus distinguishable: 
(a) Religion conceived as worship is in the hands of a 
special family, who in birth, in life, and, as a rule, in death 
are beset with ceremony, which may have, indeed, a moral 
purpose, though a purpose not understood of those who 
observe it. But (b) the two persons, or God and man, 
related in religion are alike moral ; the morality of God 
involving that of man. All God's laws, therefore, which 
define His own character and conduct as well as man's, are 
ethical. What we call, the ceremonial law is limited to a 
class ; while what we term the moral law is not thus limited, 
but is intended for man as man. The suitability of the 
moral and the unsuitability of the ceremonial to man was, 
as a matter of fact, known even in Judaism, which believed 
that the God who gives the law was more important than 
the law He gave. 

It follows (a) that religion must be moral because God 
is and man ought to be ; (b) as the individual is, so ought 
the people to be, i.e. a religion is in an equal measure the 
concern of the individual and of society ; (c) moral law in 
Judaism may be said to have consisted of duties man owed 
to God, to himself, and to society; fulfilment of one set of 
duties implied fulfilment of each of the other sets. Hence 
the command: **Thou shalt have no other gods before 
Me," signified that God alone is, that man was bound thus to 
recognize God, in which recognition the people or the State 
was bound to participate. From this it followed inevitably 
that man could make no image of God ; for God had made 
one of Himself, and no other could be. In Isaiah there is 
a graphic picture of the carpenter and the blacksmith, and 
each, as necessary to the making of an idol, maketh it out 



172 THE MORAL IDEAL IN JUDAISM IS SOCIAL, 

of blocks of wood and pieces of iron.* The idol being made, 
men fall down and worship it, impute to it a sanctity and 
a power the separate blocks of wood and bits of iron 
had not nor could possess. The law which forbids any 
man to make any graven image speaks rather of man 
as a being who can worship and who ought to worship 
none save God, since in making all things He made 
even him. The God who is described as jealous thinks so 
well of man that He cannot bear to think that he is de- 
ceived in the person he worships. And so man is forbidden 
to take the name of God in vain, which he does when he 
professes yet fails to worship God, who expects the men 
who worship Him to be real and honourable. Man is also 
commanded to keep the Sabbath holy. As Dr. Lightfoot 
says in the essay before quoted: ''The celebration of the 
first day in the week was necessary to stimulate and direct 
the devotion of the believers." One day set apart for the 
worship of God is therefore the consecration of time. So, 
too, with the command: ''Honour thy father and thy 
mother." "Charity begins at home," we say, forgetful 
that it ought not to end there. And where father and 
mother are honoured, all other persons are accounted 
honourable. For he who despises his parents despises also 
the race. And the law which selects duties man owes to 
God and to himself, selects also duties he owes to society. 
The things he has to refrain from doing are at once personal 
and social evils; for what are murdering, committing 
adultery, lying or bearing false witness, stealing, coveting, 
save sins against God and self and society? The higher 
man rises, the more absolute become his duties and the 
keener his sense of obligation, which means that man under- 
goes the very process he has applied to God, who morally 

* Isa. xliv. 10-17. 



AND JESUS AN IMPERSONATED MORAL LAW 1 73 

improves as time goes on; for His sublimity becomes 
majesty, His righteousness turns into love. He is a moral 
Sovereign of moral men. The search for worshippers be- 
comes simply a search for men who are capable of imitating 
God. Thus none but good men can serve a good God, who 
loves moral beings to serve Him, and who alone on earth 
and in time can save moral men. 

2. Law as moral, and therefore as social, was one of the 
most splendid gifts which Judaism bestowed upon Chris- 
tianity, and it was as a gift all the more splendid that it 
carried with it the idea of ordered growth. To conceive 
man as made in the image of God was to conceive him as 
like Deity capable of moving ever upward — at least, in the 
case of God not in Himself, but in the eyes of men. The 
inner was thus made a reflection of the outer, and man 
became, both in human eyes and in inward experience, 
more perfect as a moral, a social, and a civilizing being. 
To complete this idea, therefore, a more perfect religion 
than Judaism was necessary, and this was found in Chris- 
tianity. Jesus was Himself the new law, and love of Him 
supplied a notion which impelled onward, a thing the law 
had no power that could do. As the Son of Man He stood as 
no man's son at the head of Humanity, where He appeared 
as the type of man. He became thus the impersonation 
not only of Deity, but of duty ; and man, as his supreme end, 
has to become Christ-like. He proved , personally, how God 
could be grace and truth; and could therefore transcend 
the limits of race. As Jesus in Himself was more than 
Moses had been to his people. His life was, as it were, an 
impersonated law ; the teaching which unfolded the meaning 
of His person may be described as ethical and social. His 
love was more, therefore, than a motive impelling man ; it 
made Himself for an ideal which man was bound to realize. 



174 TEACHES A BROTHERHOOD ARTICULATING FATHERHOOD. 

3. Our primary concern, then, is with the person and 
teaching of Jesus. As to His teaching, it may be said to have 
articulated His own character, particularly in His depend- 
ence upon God. He begins His career as a teacher by 
calling disciples and teaching them. His fundamental prin- 
ciple is : * * Be ye perfect , as your Father in heaven is 
perfect." * He also teaches that man should not be as the 
flowers of the field, which bloom to-day and to-morrow are 
cast in the fire to be burned. For men ought to repeat 
the righteousness which God has prescribed, which reflects 
God's own character. To say, therefore, that men are to 
be perfect as God is simply to say that they are to be 
righteous as He is. As to His person, Jesus came to found 
the kingdom of heaven, or a brotherhood which articulated 
a sonship that in its turn expressed a Divine Fatherhood. 
Men, as members of one family, became brothers, and so 
stood to receive Christ's teaching. Christian virtue is 
simply the manner of acting, which corresponds to the idea 
of man as the child of God. Man, in other words, stands 
within the household of faith, and as such his duties are 
more than personal, and his virtues must be as his duties 
are. Jesus teaches the lawyer who comes running to Him 
to ask what commandment is the greatest thus: **The 
greatest commandment is to love God, and the second is to 
loveyour neighbour as yourself, "t The question then be- 
came: ** Who is my neighbour?" To which Jesus replied 
by the parable of the good Samaritan, in which the man 
who fell among thieves was rescued by neither priest nor 
Levite, nor a Jew according to the flesh, but by a man who, 
as a Samaritan, was despised as an unholy person.} The 
man who tempted Him was constrained to say that the 
neighbour was he who did the neighbourly thing and 

* Matt. V. 48, t Mark xii. 28-34. J Luke x. 30-35. 



ETHICS NEITHER STATUTORY NOR ASCETIC, BUT SOCIAL 175 

showed mercy, not the unneighbourly * As is the teaching 
of Christ such is the teaching of His apostles. To die with 
Him is to be raised together with Him, and to live unto 
Him is the same as living unto God. Every son of God 
is thus a brother of man. Enough has been said, therefore, 
to show that neither the idea of religion which Rome has 
cultivated, nor the idea of episcopacy which is shared in 
common by both the Roman and the Anglican churches, 
can in any measure fulfil the social and ethical ideal of 
Christ. Not that Rome has had no idea of Christian virtue. 
It has had ; but the virtue has been either statutory or 
ascetic. As statutory it falls back into Jewish legalism; 
as ascetic it can only throw the man back upon himself 
without making of him a beneficent force for social ameliora- 
tion. Nor can the polity which we have seen to be faithless 
to Christ's ideal be reconciled with the affinity of all Chris- 
tian brethren; for a man who stands easily above others 
is a mere creature of statutory or civil law, not of the in- 
ternal fitness which goes towards the making of the Christian 
man. While, therefore, neither theory, whether religious 
or political, is compatible with the social ideal of Chris- 
tianity, we can further say that both keep it back instead 
of helping it forward. 

* Luke X. 37. 



V 



HOW THE RELIGION OF CHRIST GREW INTO 
CATHOLICISM 

I 

/^UR past discussions have brought us face to face with 
^-^ a curious problem — How has a political and sacer- 
dotal system so complex, so immense, so inclusive as the pa- 
pal, risen out of a society so simple, spontaneous, and unor- 
ganized as the apostolic? or, how has the priestless, kindly, 
sanely domestic and socially human, and therefore moral, 
religion of Jesus developed into the hierarchic and celibate 
sacerdotalism of Rome? 

I. It is impossible within our limits to deal adequately 
and exhaustively with this problem, but one or two 
points may be noted which indicate the oldest tendencies 
and signs of change. These are found outside the New 
Testament, not, indeed, in the most ancient and authentic 
extra-canonical literature, which may here be termed 
primary; but in what we may term the secondary 
literature, which is more or less spurious and corrupt. 
In Clemens Romanus, for example, the church idea is 
thoroughly apostolic. In the individual church, episcopacy, 
in the modern sense, is quite unknown, order is loved, " the 
overseers" or leaders, who are also named **the presbyters 
and deacons," are honoured, and have authority over the 
people only as they worthily fill the office they have re- 
ceived, in harmony with apostolic custom and ordinance.* 

* Ch. xliv. In this same chapter occurs the verse (i) which Rothe used 
as one of his great proofs for the apostolic institution of the episcopate {Die 

176 



CLEMENS ROMANUS AND THE CORINTHIAN CHURCH 177 

As to the ministry there is no reference to any bishop in 
either the Roman or the Corinthian church ; no notion of 
the church save as a society of God's elect; no idea that 
any man or body of men has the right to control its action, 
or possesses any claim to jurisdiction over its affairs. As 
to the relation of the churches, Rome claims no primacy 
over Corinth, demands no obedience from it, but simply 
writes a letter of fraternal expostulation and advice. 
Church speaks to church, not bishop to bishop, or presby- 
tery to presbytery, the writer absolutely suppressing his 
own personality that the church may the more emphati- 
cally speak. The occasion of the letter is significant; 
the church at Corinth had deposed certain men, bishops 
and deacons, from office. Its right to do so is never 
even by implication questioned, the complaint and remon- 
strance being simply this — the act is unjust, for the 
men are holy and blameless. So completely is the 
modern notion of bishop absent that the same persons 
are evidently meant by the terms rfyovfjievot, irpea-^vrepoi, 
iTTicTKoirot.^ Thirty years later this plurality of persons in 
the office and variety of name for it come out quite as 
strongly in Hermas, where we find the terms, TrpeafivrepoL^lf 
iTTLa/coTTOt,'^ TTporjyovfJLevoL,^ TTpcoTOKadeBpcTaijW used to denote 

Anfdnge der christlichen Kirche, pp. 374-92). His interpretation is so 
fanciful and forced that it remains his — too peculiar to become any other 
body's. Even Dr. Lightfoot, though his own essay owes so much to 
Rothe, and he is so strongly tempted by the fineness of the theory, holds 
the interpretation to be " unwarranted, and to interrupt the context with 
irrelevant matter " {Epis. S. Clement of Rome, Notes to ch. xliv. Cf. 
Philippians, pp. 199 ff.). See also Gebhardt and Harnack's Pat. Apos. 
Opera, Fascic. i, pp. 71 ff. Baur {Ursprung des Episcopats, pp. 53-61) 
examines exhaustively Rothe' s interpretation, as does also Ritschl [Entste- 
hung der altkatol, Kirche, pp. 412-15. 2nd ed.). Donaldson [ed. 1874], The 
Apostolic Fathers, pp. 17 1-5, discusses the point briefly, but impartially. 

* Cf. cc. i, xliv, xlvii, liv, Ivii. f Vis. ii, 4. J Ibid., iii, 5. 

§ Ibid., i, 2. II Ibid., iii. 9. 

N 



178 THE CHANGE IN HERMAS AND POLYCARP. 

the overseers of the churches. In the last reference and 
term the Shepherd evidently means to be ironical and 
admonitory. He means to reprove the struggle after the 
preeminence, which to him is typified by the chief seat or 
highest place, and so he elsewhere describes the man who 
exalts himself, and wishes to have the Trpcoro/caOeSptav as 
one who is a prophet only in seeming.* While Hermas 
shows a change, not indeed unresisted, in process at Rome 
in the first half of the second century, Polycarp helps us to 
see the same in the East. His epistle to the Philippians 
presents a remarkable phenomenon — he seems in the super- 
scription to distinguish himself from the presbyters who 
are with him; but in the epistle he neither mentions nor 
in any way alludes to any bishop in Philippi.t The church 
there had its presbyters and deacons, but no person that 
could be described as a bishop. 

2. The change thus seen at work appears in a completer 
and more emphatic form in, on the one hand, the Ignatian 
Epistles, and, on the other, the Clementine Recognitions 
and Homilies. These are, indeed, very dissimilar pro- 
ductions, but this only makes their agreement — if bishop 
means the same thing in both — on the point in question 
the more significant. The former, at least in their 
earliest and least corrupt form, belong to the first, the 
latter to the second half of the second century. The 
interval that divides them from Clemens Romanus is 
simply immense. The Ignatian Epistles are a standing 
problem and perplexity to criticism; some of them are 
certainly spurious, all of them are largely interpolated 

* Mand. xi. Cf. Luke xiv. 7-14, in particular verse 10 is to be studied. 
Matt. xxii. 2-10; xxiii. 4-12; Mark xii. 38-39; Luke xi. 43; xx. 46. 

t See Lightfoot in Ignatius and Polycarp, i, pt. ii, p. 380. As to reasons 
which keep Polycarp silent as to the episcopal office in Philipp., cf. vii, viii, 
and xi. 



COMPARISON or CLEMENTINES AND IGNATIAN EPISTLES 1 79 

and hopelessly corrupt, but all the more they are signifi- 
cant of changes that were secretly, but effectually, trans- 
forming the Christian Church. The Clementine works, 
on the other hand, are less a textual and literary 
puzzle, but quite as great an historical one; they are 
more homogeneous, also more heretical, but no more 
authentic. These works represent two distinct yet re- 
lated tendencies : the Ignatian Epistles are without Pauline 
spirit, though anti-Jewish ; the Clementine are Petrine or 
Jacobean; thougheach works towards a Jewish end. Both 
are significant and effective of ecclesiastical change, but 
the Ignatian is more Gentile and ethical, the Clementine 
more Judaic and legal. The tendency in both is towards 
a corporate unity, which is secured and symbolized by 
the eVtWoTTo?. In both the bishop is a necessity to the 
church, embodies and, in a sense, creates it. In the 
Ignatian Epistles he is the soul and source of order, the 
efficient agent in worship; who honours him honours 
God, who refuses to hear him refuses to hear God, 
whose vicar or substitute he is. In the Clementine 
Homilies, the Church, like the State, means a single ruler 
— many kings cause many wars — and is compared to a 
ship whose master is God, whose pilot is Christ, whose 
chief oarsman is the bishop, without whom it cannot carry 
its passengers into the haven of eternal blessedness. The 
Epistles* describe the bishop as ek tottov Oeov Trpofcadrj/nevo^ ; 
the Homilies t say of him, o 'wpoKaOe^o^ievo^ Xpcarov tottov 
TreTTiCTTevTai. The idea is in both the same; the Bishop 
presides in the place of God ; he sits in the chair and 
occupies the place of Christ. In both he creates unity; 
but the unity he creates is not the same. Thus within the 
agreement there is a most significant difference; the 

* Ad. Mag., vi. 

t Horn, iii, 66, Cf. Recognitions, iii, 66. Ep. Clem. Ad. Jac, 17. 



l8o COMPARISON or THE POLITY AND THE THEOLOGY 

Ignatian bishop is the bishop of the given church, or 
congregation, made by the church he rules, without any 
right to be, apart from it; but the Clementine bishop is 
kinsman and representative of the Lord, possessing the 
rights and authority of Him whose representative he is, 
making by his very presence the cause he champions 
apostolic and Christian. With the first a second difference, 
no less significant, is connected. The Ignatian bishop is 
mainly of political importance, the symbol of order in 
discipline and worship; but the Clementine is mainly 
doctrinal, the vehicle or agent of a distinct theological 
tendency. The episcopal idea was not fully elaborated 
till the two tendencies were united, and this union, which 
was strictly Western, we see in Irenaeus when he argues 
that a special order or class was needed for the trans- 
mission of the apostolic doctrine. His skilful argument 
had been anticipated by the author of the Clementines, 
and so the grand depository of truth and safeguard of 
orthodoxy was fitly enough the product of the earliest 
and most anti-Christian heresy. 



II 

I. That this is the simple and strict historical truth 
becomes evident when we compare the two sets of docu- 
ments for the moment before us. The Ignatian Epistles 
have a political and disciplinary tendency, but the Clemen- 
tines a distinctly doctrinal purpose. In the former the 
great concern of the bishop, what he has zealously to seek, 
is unity, the most precious of things. In order to secure 
it he must be patient with all men, studious of the weak, 
vigilant, prayerful, faithful, standing fast in the truth, 
discerning the times, being specially watchful of the people 



or THE CLEMENTINES AND THE IGNATIAN EPISTLES l8l 

and mindful of all that pertains to the care and cure of 
souls, to the regularity and regulation of worship. These 
epistles are possessed with a great fear, the fear that the 
Spirit may be too varied in His manifestations. Order 
is to be created by each church having a single head, law- 
lessness repressed by law being made to reside in a single 
person. Nothing in its way could be less apostolic, less 
Hebrew in its suspicion of man, less Greek in its fear of 
freedom, than this attitude of mind. The epistles are quite 
without the fine respect for Christian freedom, the noble 
faith in Christian manhood, in its essential and ultimate 
reasonableness, which ever characterizes Paul. The belief 
in outer and political as opposed to inner and spiritual 
methods, in an administrative human will as opposed to a 
constraining Divine love, in a legal uniformity as opposed to 
a spiritual unity, is the belief that distinguishes, almost 
immeasurably for the worse, these Ignatian from the Apos- 
tolical Epistles. We have come into another and lower 
atmosphere and find the enthusiasm of the apostle super- 
seded by the fanaticism of the churchman. 

2. The spirit and tendency of the Clementines are very 
different. They are written in opposition to Pauline or 
Gentile Christianity, and in the interests of Ebionitic or 
Judaic. They embody the spirit and doctrine Paul con- 
tended against in his Corinthian, Roman, and Galatian 
Epistles ; and thus they represent men who wish to do two 
things (a) bring the old into the new economy, and (/5) make 
the gospel a continuation and extension of the law. They 
can do this best by personalizing authority, exactly in the 
manner so severely rebuked in first Corinthians and 
Galatians; and as there, so here, the names that are con- 
jured with are those of James and Peter. James and his 
brother apostles are made the only accredited teachers, who 



l82 THE CLEMENTINES DO NOT ARGUE. 

bestow by ordination the right to teach. The eTrtV/coTro? 
iiriCTKOTTcov is James ; he is the ultimate authority, and what- 
ever he does not allow is heresy.* By this means the freer 
and more universal Christianity can easily be dealt with ; it 
has only to be represented as in antagonism with the original 
apostolic brotherhood. Argument is not needed ; history is 
argument. In these Clementine Homilies and Recognitions 
we have the Ebionitic version of the apostolic history ; it is 
a late, unauthentic, and almost purely imaginary version ; 
but only on this account the more significant as to what the 
Judaizing party wished Christianity to be, and as to how 
they hoped to realize their wishes. Their hopes were in an 
authoritative person, in a personalized unity. If Moses 
could be superinduced on Christ, if the Levitical legalism 
could be placed over the gospel, with all that the Old im- 
plied in contrast to the New as to the dominion of the letter 
and the bondage of the spirit, then there might be hope 
for the victory of the ancient. And only by the agency 
of an authoritative person could this be done; and he, of 
course, was expressly created for the work. The law v/as 
incompatible with freedom . * ' Where the spirit of the Lord 
is, there is liberty ' ' ; and where men feared this liberty, 
a freedom diffused through every unit of the church, they 
met it by the institution of an episcopal priest, who was to 
be the basis of order, and the symbol of unity, the vicar 
and voice of God-t Episcopacy was thus the product of 
faithlessness; it grew out of a double disbelief (a) in the 

* Recog. iv, 35 ; Horn, xi, 35. Peter is the speaker, but James is in 
both cases commended. The utmost care is to be taken that no one who 
does not come from Jerusalem and bring a certificate from James, "the 
Lord's brother," be received as a teacher. No other than he who brings 
such a testimonial is a "fit and fruitful teacher," or can give the "grace 
of baptism" ; i.e. enter clothed in spotless raiment to the wedding-supper 
of the Lamb. Allegorical exegesis came into being with false doctrine. 

I Ignatian Epistles. Ephes. vi. ; Trallian, ii. ; Smyr. ix. ; Mag. iii. 



TO NARRATE THE HISTORY IS ARGUMENT 183 

sufficiency of the gospel to save the men who were enslaved 
by sin, and (/3) in the power of the Spirit to guide and control 
the men Christ had made free. 



Ill 

I. Once these ideas found a footing in the young society, 
their development was inevitable. The development was 
not, indeed, uniform; it was more rapid in Syria and Asia 
Minor, more gradual in Greece and Alexandria and Rome.* 

* One of the things which an ecclesiastical historian must reckon with 
is the influence of geography upon the constitution of the Christian 
Church and its growth. This influence was a fact which the late Bishop 
Lightfoot knew — he was too thorough a scholar to be ignorant of it ; yet 
when knowledge became inconvenient, no man could forget it more 
completely. He must have known the distinction between ancient and 
modem times, yet he continued to speak of the earlier bishop as a bishop 
"in the later and strict sense of the term," and his account of the 
Episcopate in his learned work on Ignatius (vol. i., pt. ii., pp. 375-390), 
shows that he well knew the distinction. He understood also the differ- 
ences, as regards the episcopal offices and duties, between the eastern and 
western churches, as well as the relation in which the episcopate stood 
to heresy and heretical opinion. What he calls "the strange audacity 
of writers like Daille," who rejected the Epistles because he thought 
episcopacy could not be earlier than " the beginning of the third century," 
and because he knew the bishops Ignatius described were "wholly 
different" from those who reigned later, and of whose rather cruel 
tender mercies he had had personal experience, he himself accepts, 
agreeing wholly with Daillaeus. In the personal argument Lightfoot 
" strangely" agrees, though he does not observe on what is to us cardinal, 
that it was mainly in the matter of the episcopate that the churches in Great 
Britain, notably the Celtic, which stood in most organic connection with 
the east, differed from the Rome of Gregory, Augustine of Canterbury, 
and Theodore. But he notes in detail the points in which the 
Ignatian differ from the modern Catholic bishops, as (a) " they are not 
priests" ; "throughout the letters there is not the slightest tinge of sacer- 
dotal language in reference to any bishop." "The only passage in which 
a priest or a high-priest is mentioned at all is Philad. ix. " The 
exegesis which refers it to the Christian ministry is careless ; a more 
careful exegesis refers it to Christ. (/3) Nor are they monarchs, "lords 
over God's heritage"; the bishop has no authority without his council 
(Philad. viii.), and submission is equally required to the presbyters (Ephes. 



184 EPISCOPACY IN THE EAST AND WEST. 

This is as was to be expected, and is in harmony with the 
origin and rapid growth of the high episcopal doctrine 
among the heretical sects of the East, especially those 
Judaizing sects that were so strongly opposed to the spiritual 
Christianity of Paul. But though the tendency became 
so common as to grow irresistible, the old customs and 
beliefs struggled hard for life, and died slowly. While the 
bishop became the symbol and source of authority, who 

ii. 20; Mag. ii. 7; Matt, xiii.), and to the deacons (Polyc. vi.). And (7) 
"There is no trace" in the letters to the diocese of a bishop, "properly 
so-called " ; "it is a mistake to suppose that Ignatius is called ' Bishop of 
Syria' in Rom. ii," In a note the famous phrase is explained as "the 
Bishop belonging to Syria," or "from the distant east," where "the 
genitive denotes not the extent of his jurisdiction, but the place of his 
abode." " Episcopacy has not passed beyond its primitive stage. The 
bishop and presbyter are the ministers of a city, not of a diocese." And 
(5) "the unequal development of the episcopate" is also emphasised. It 
is acknowledged that the episcopate which Ignatius knows is confined to 
Asia Minor. Of the seven letters which bore his name, six are addressed 
to churches in Asia, and are full of exhortations urging obedience to the 
bishops ; but the other epistle, which is a letter to Rome, is entirely free 
from any such command. And there is here no inconsistency, for it 
entirely agrees with "the information derived from other trustworthy 
sources." The episcopacy "developed in Asia Minor" was earlier than 
the episcopacy developed in Rome ; Bishop Lightfoot ought to have empha- 
sised the differences and the causes of it, and he would have found that 
for so complex a result there were more causes than one. It did not need 
all his wealth of learning to show that the east knew the bishop before 
the west ; but two things we needed to know were (a) why the bishop in the 
east so differed from his brother in the west, and continued to differ, and 
{(3) why the eastern was so much earlier than the western development. 
While the names agreed, the things differed ; and there was no need for 
learning so vast and thought so massive to prove that the ancient bishop 
had nothing in common with the modem except the name, and that the 
bishop who had no diocese and owed his very being to the church, had his 
modem analogue rather in the pastor of a congregation than in what we 
commonly know as the bishop of a diocese. But the point of the 
criticism is both literary and geographical, though most of all the 
latter, and under each, whether literature or geography, two facts 
have been here emphasised, though not unduly : failure, in the one 
case, to explain the facts (a) the difference between the ancient and the 
modern bishop, and (/3) the contrasted developments of east and west» 
He has therefore in the latter case to state what he does not (a) the 



UNITY OF THOUGHT AND POLITY 185 

alone could ordain, without whom neither baptism nor the 
eucharist could be celebrated, yet we see in Tertullian's 
silence as to his functions, how the right to administer these 
still lingered in the community ; * and even in Cyprian 
traces of the original equality of bishops and presbyters can 
be discovered .f But various conditions combined to favour 
the new development. The political evoked the sacerdotal 
tendency, and together they became the main factors of a 
movement that effected a radical revolution in the spiritual 
and priestless religion of Christ. The change, indeed, was 
slow and gradual. The oldest Judaizing heresy was legal 
in the manner of the Pharisees, but not sacerdotal as were 
the Sadducees; and as legal it laboured to introduce circum- 
cision, but not sacrifice, the law of the scribes, not the 
order of the priesthood. The very Clementines, with all 

reason of the growth in the east, and (/S) why Rome should be in this 
matter an exception to Asia ; and (7) how it happened that a city which 
gave its name to the church which has the episcopal order most highly de- 
veloped, should yet be slower to welcome a change in the dignity of the 
ministry than a ruder church. On another point I have a criticism also 
to offer. While not wishing to defend the critical school of Tubingen, I 
think more highly of it than did Lightfoot, who kaew how to be just as 
well as generous to an opponent ; and I deprecate the statement, which is 
as incorrect as possible, that its members as modern critics conceived the 
episcopate " as a monarchical office, which developed more rapidly at Rome 
than elsewhere." Baur was too intelligent a church historian so to think ; 
though he would have done so had he been merely polemical. And so he 
said it was characteristic of Rome, not only to love unity, but also "den 
Schooss der Einen seligmachenden Kirche fiir alle der Aufnahme Fahigen 
im weitesten Umfang zu offnen," 

* In the De Corona iii. Tertullian argues that even unwritten tradition 
is adequate as proof, and in evidence he cites (a) Baptism which is only 
undertaken before the congregation and its President, (/3) the eucharist 
which the Lord commanded and we all observe. In an exposition of 
Romans vi. 3-4 in the De Resurr. Carnis he speaks in a way that would have 
pleased the apostle Paul about dying to sin and living to righteousness. 
Cf. also C. 48, as well as the whole of the Treatise on Baptism which con 
tains both the author's view of the historical conditions and a statement 
of the reasons that induced him to write. 

t I shall speak more fully a little later about Cyprian. 



l86 SACERDOTALISM AND EPISCOPACY. 

their zeal for Jewish Christianity and aversion to Gentile, 
Stand remote from the sacerdotal idea; they speak of 
Christ as more illustrious than any priest, and only 
once apply to Him the term High Priest * The faith 
of the second century was like the faith of the first, as is 
proved by sayings like those of Justin Martyr, "We Chris- 
tians are the true high priestly race of God" ;t or those of 
Irenaeus, "All righteous men have entered the priestly 
order."} The universal priesthood could not be official, 
could only be spiritual in its character, acts, and functions. 
2. But the political and sacerdotal tendency created 
an order or class so specially and exclusively concerned 
with religion as to be necessary to the organization and 
administration of the church. The fc\7]po<; came to stand 
over against the \ao9,§ and the more the distinction 
was emphasized the more sacred functions became the 
special possession of the clergy; and so the notion of 
sanctity got associated with the office and dissociated 
from the person. The K\rjpo<; was one order, special, 

* Recog. i, 46-48. 

f Dial. 116. Justin's own phrase is, apxi'^po-TiKbp rb dXrjdLvdv yivo$ iafikv 
ToO deoO. The idea is expressed repeatedly — God has sworn to Christ, 
"Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek." Psalm ex. 
speaks of the Messiah, not of king Hezekiah, and He is, according to 
it, an eternal priest. The fact that God accepts no sacrifice "except 
through His priest," is made to prove that Christian prayers are sacrifices 
agreeable to God (116-117), and Malachi i. lo-ii is quoted to prove that 
God utterly rejects both the priests and sacrifices of Judaism, 

I Adv. Haer. iv, c. 8, § 3. What Irenaeus himself said is thus given in 
our version, " Omnes enim justi sacerdotalem habent ordinem." The 
sentence occurs in an exposition of Luke vi. 3, 4, or Mark ii. 25-26. The 
Greek version which John of Damascus used substituted "righteous 
King" (^ao-Xeus ot Uaios) for "Just persons" (justi), but our version is not 
only more in keeping with the argument but with the theology of Irenaeus. 

§ The distinction comes from the LXX. K\i]pos translates 8 Hebrew 
terms, while \a6s translates 17. Yet so far as my reading has gone 
kXtjpos never denotes the priesthood, while Xa6s almost uniformly denotes 
" the people." 



THE IDEAS or CLERGY AND LAITY 187 

consecrated, elect; and the Xao^ another order, common, 
secular, profane. If the clergy were necessary to the being 
of the church, they were also necessary to the realiza- 
tion of religion; and so there was not only the gravest 
of all schisms introduced into the body of Christ, but 
the centre of gravity was changed; and all movements, 
evolutional and organizing, regulated by the legislative 
and administrative order rather than by the Divine and 
living Head. 

3. In this notion of the KXrjpo^;^ so utterly unknown and 
alien to primitive and apostolical Christianity, a whole 
new sacerdotalism was involved, and waited only time and 
opportunity for evolution. And these were not denied. 
The moment given official persons are conceived as necessary 
to the sanctity and truth of worship, collective and social, 
and in order to its fit performance formed into a special 
body or class — that moment a priesthood has been con- 
stituted. The birth of the idea in the Christian Church 
signified the victory of heathen and Jewish customs and 
ideas over the truth and kingdom of Christ. Without the 
peculiar political development we have traced, this victory 
would have been impossible ; with this development it was 
inevitable. Neander thinks that the idea of an official 
priesthood came into Christianity from Judaism.* Ritschl, 
on the other hand, derives it from the inability of the 
Gentile Christianity to understand the fundamental truths 
of the gospel .f The two positions do not exclude each 
other ; both are necessary to the explanation of the result, 
and neither is sufficient alone. Mental tendencies common 
to Jew and Greek were the efficient factors of the change, 
the political development supplied the conditions of their 

* Church Hist., vol. i, pp. 270, 271. (Bohn's Ed.) 
t Altkathol, Kirche, p. 394. 



l86 A PRIESTHOOD NATIVE TO THE HEBREW 

action, and the relation, at once filial and supersessory, of 
the new religion to Judaism, furnishes the norm or form 
of the idea to be realized. Jew and Greek alike esteemed 
the sacerdotal the sacred; what was not sensuously holy 
was not holy at all. Both alike knew the priest, but neither 
knew religion without him ; and thus were not so disciplined 
and exercised as to be able easily to comprehend so pure 
and spiritual a thing as a religion without priests. If the 
church had been allowed to remain as it had been made 
by Christ and His apostles, it would have educated men 
into the spirit of the new religion, have taught them to 
exercise the spiritual and royal priesthood granted to uni- 
versal Christian manhood. But the special religious class, 
with its graded orders, directly suggested the ancient priest- 
hoods, and the idea thus suggested found at once expression, 
expansion, and authority from the relation in which the 
New Testament was conceived to stand to the Old. The 
one was the type, the other the antitype, and logic, which 
is never so rigorous as when it works in the collective mind, 
drove men to seek in the antitype a parallel, or copy of 
every element they found in the type. In the apostolical 
age, as became its exalted standpoint, the symbols of the 
old were conceived as fulfilled in the spiritual realities of the 
new; the visible and carnal sacrifices, temple, priesthood 
of Mosaism, were replaced by the living sacrifices, the 
invisible temple, the universal priesthood of Christ and 
His Church. But the men of a century later were too 
sensuous to comprehend this exalted ideal; they could 
better understand the new as not the spiritual fulfilment, 
but the actual reproduction of the old. Old Testament 
prophecy is the historical basis of apostolic Christianity, 
but Old Testament legalism, as lower and more sensuous, 
was more intelligible to the Gentile, because more in harmony 



AND TO THE GREEK MIND 189 

with the unethical heathenism, so rich in priests, in which 
he had been nursed. This, indeed, was a point where Jew 
and Gentile could most sympathetically meet, and unite 
in the effort to translate the new back into the terms and 
conditions of the older faith. 

IV 

I. These historical movements and mental tendencies, 
viewed in their reciprocal action, made the rise of a new 
priesthood natural and, in a sense, inevitable. It was more 
familiar and sensible, more in harmony with universal 
and immemorial custom, to speak of the person active 
in religion as a priest than as an elder, or teacher, or 
preacher. It was an inconvenient thing to men who 
had to prove the truth of the new religion by the 
authority of the old, to find the one culminate in a 
priestly organization, while the other had no organized 
or visible priesthood whatever. Thus Clemens Romanus* 
uses the high priest, priest, and Levite of Judaismf 

* About Clement little is known ; he wrote his epistle, and having 
caused it to become, himself ceased to be. He is a voice, and nothing 
more. Though a companion of the Apostles, yet he is unnamed in the 
New Testament. He is not, though Origen and Eusebius (H.E. iii. 4, 10) 
are of a contrary opinion, to be identified with the Clement mentioned by 
Paul in Phil. iv. 3. Still less is he identical with Titus Flavins Clemens, 
a nephew of the Emperor Vespasian, whose wife, the famous DomitHla, 
was of the same family as her husband. Our Clement probably was a 
freedman of the relative of the imperial house, and had taken his master's 
name. This may be the reason why he is always spoken of with respect, 
though it is evident that he could not have been the bishop or pastor of 
the Roman Church unless he had been a man of conviction and virtue. 
While in the judgment of antiquity the actual author of the epistle 
which the church at Rome sent to the church at Corinth, his name does 
not occur in it ; he simply obeys the community, which makes the epistle 
all the completer as a mirror of the time. 

f The passage which is most significant is the following : and here I 
cannot do better than give Lightfoot's translation : — "For unto the high- 
priest his proper services have been assigned, and to the priests their 



IQO THE FATHERS 

to prove and illustrate his idea of order in Christianity; 
and though he does not find a parallel priesthood in the 
latter, yet his argument shows that he was saved from 
this simply by the still prevailing apostolic constitution 
of the church. But once the political tendency had created 
the clerical order and made the bishop the cardinal person 
in worship, authoritative in doctrine, executive in discipline, 
the basis and symbol of unity, then the conditions existed 
that not only allowed, Jbut even required, the sacerdotal 
tendency to transfer the Jewish priesthood, changed in name, 
but unchanged in spirit and essence, into the Christian 
church. The act of translation, open and confessed, meets 
us strangely but instructively enough in Tertullian.* Two 

proper office is appointed, and upon the Levites their proper ministrations 
are laid." And then Clement xl. adds, indicating a distinction which was 
destined, with a changed connotation, to play a great part in future de- 
velopments : "The layman is bound by the layman's ordinances." The 
point is significant, were it only as expressing the controversy that divided 
the church at Corinth. The difficulty as to the Lord's Supper or seasons 
which Paul was attempting to vanquish and overcome, is exaggerated ; 
and he finds that as the places were, so the persons are by whom he would 
have them administered. The sense of the above quotation is well 
represented by the paraphrase which Lightfoot gives in his notes on page 
120: "In the law of Moses the high-priest, the priests, the Levites, the 
laity, all have their distinct functions." It is well, indeed, to remember 
" the laity has its own functions." Under this term the people of God as a 
whole are to be understood ; and this we have to remember in a connection 
where Lightfoot adds that "of bishops, properly so called, no mention is 
made in this epistle." In his notes on page 123 it is also said, that: 
"There is no distinct reference to the Christian ministry in apxi-epevs" but 
only "an argument by analogy." How then does it exist ? "The answer 
to this seems to be that, though the episcopate appears to have been 
widely established in Asia Minor at this time, this epistle throughout only 
recognises two orders, presbyters and deacons, as existing in Corinth." 
And with regard to "the late development of the episcopate in Corinth," 
reference is made not to the Greek population and the Greek character of 
the city, but to his own dissertation in Philippians, pages 213-214, and to 
his Ignatius and Polycarp, page 562 ft. 

* Tertullian is correctly enough described in the text. He was a 
Montanist by nature and by birth ; a Jew by education and disposition. 
God had made him the man he was ; a lover of freedom, whose inspira- 



AND TERTULLIAN, MONTANIST AND JEW IQI 

rival tendencies struggle in him, the Montanist and the 
Jewish, and though the former prevailed in what we may 
term the sphere of life and practice, the latter penetrated and 
tragically transformed his idea of religion. The term sacer- 
dos grows familiar to him * The presbyters form an or do 

tions were religious impulses ; a man who believed in religion and in the 
equality of men. Yet he was educated in law, believed in it, and was in- 
clined to obey it. He, therefore, believed by nature that all his inspira- 
tions were from God, and so he became a Montanist, a man who had 
faith in freedom and inspiration ; but by education he had faith in law as 
that which God had made for man and the ordering of his life ; and so he 
was a Jew. And so he adhered to Montanism which was free and 
inspirational ; and yet to Judaism, which was legal and statutory. 
Hence in all his polemics he was religious and inspirational, and in all a 
believer in order ; and both tendencies were alike marked in all his 
writings. Hence he conceived Christ as a second Moses who comes to 
teach and enforce a new law. Hence He appears as preaching the " novam 
legem." Besides this general phrase TertuUian has particular phrases which 
mark him as an adept in Roman law. Thus he argues, there is "lex non 
scripta " an unwritten law, which he also names " primordialis," or 
"naturalis," which he says, in the true spirit of a Roman lawyer, is a law 
which statutory or positive cannot repeal. He also names the " naturalis " 
"lex communis," and affirms that he so names it because it is "in publico 
mundi," written of God on tables of the heart that all men may read and 
obey (De Corona, 6). He elsewhere argues that God owns both law and 
prophets ; that He enforces duty in the one and faith in the other, and is 
maker of the nature which is as good as law to those who have not any 
written law. The Gospel has its root in the law (Scorpiace, 50,). 

* De Pudic. 21. Tertullian's argument is characteristic, almost 
Miltonic, indeed, in plainness of speech and frank irony. He says "the 
forgiveness of sins is the work of the church through its most spiritual 
men ; it is God's work, not the priest's {Dei ipsius non sacerdotis)." He 
also argues that it is not wrong for a body to be washed by the priest 
before baptism who becomes then, in a sense, a pollinatorem sacerdotem ; 
(for the meaning of pollinatorem in Tertullian cf. Apol. 13). In his appeal 
to the people Tertullian describes the heathen and the Christian mysteries, 
and asks whether the profane can be expected to understand where the 
intelligent who are within do not, or to put it as he does, "what the 
priest (sacerdos) does not know." (Ad Nationes, i. 7 ; in Adv. Marcion, 
iv. 9). After Lu. v. 14 is quoted, Christ is described as catholicum 
patris sacerdotem. Other phrases used by Tertullian are "blind priests," 
"priests of peace" (De Spectac. 16), "priests of modesty" (De Cultu 
Fem. ci. 12), "priests of Gehenna," and "priests of evil suggestion." 



192 TERTULLIAN IN HIS LOVE OF PRIESTHOOD SYMPTOMATIC. 

sacerdotalis ,^ and the bishop is summus sacerdos,'\ and ponti- 
fex maximus.X And Tertullian was here symptomatic of 
the tendency active throughout the Church. Hippolytus § 

* De Exh. Cast. 7. The argument of Tertullian is as full of instruction 
as of interest, and contains one of our earliest distinctions between 
"priest" and "layman," which it traces to a recent act of the Church. 
The passage is practically an exposition of the law which said, "a bishop 
shall be the husband of one wife." The men who enter "the sacerdotal 
order" {in ordinem sacerdotalem)' must be men of one marriage; but men 
are mistaken who think, "what is not lawful for priests may be lawful for 
aymen." For the question is promptly asked: "Are not laymen 
priests ? " And in answer Revelation i. 6 is quoted. The presbyter is 
as the layman is, being chosen from his ranks ; and so the conclusion is 
reached, " ergo pugnare debemus ante laicum jussum a secundo matrimonio 
abstinere, dum presbyter esse non alius potest quam laicus semel fuerit 
maritus." 

f De Baptis. 17. Tertullian after the summus sacerdos, adds the 
remarkable phrase, qui est episcopus : but, in his own manner, he qualifies 
the statement by saying that "presbyters and deacons" can baptize as 
well as the " summus sacerdos," though " not without episcopal authority." 
Even laymen have the right [his] to baptize, a right which the Roman 
Church has jealously preserved to this day. I have repeatedly called 
attention to this fact showing (i.) how a great historical church like the 
Roman can be more generous than one recent like the Anglican ; (ii. ) 
human nature is stronger than the strongest organized church, mightier 
even than logical consistency. For grant that baptism is necessary to 
salvation, then when no authorized person is present to administer the 
rites that shall save the child, either parent is empowered to do it. One 
of the aphorisms we owe to Tertullian occurs in this chapter : Episco- 
patus cemulatio schismatum mater est. 

X De Pudic. i. TertuUian's Montanism saved him from falling a 
complete victim to the idea of an official priesthood. No Father pleaded 
more strongly for the universal priesthood of Christian men. The Pontifex 
Maximus of the last reference is ironical, but on this account all the more 
significant of the claims advanced by the person satirically described as the 
episcopus episcoporum. 

§ Refut. Omn. Haer. i. Proem. There is to be no attempt to determine 
here of what church, whether Roman or Western, Eastern or Arabian, 
Hippolytus was a bishop, and whether he was one, or only a presbyter. 
The one thing we have to do with here is the way in which he reflects the 
organization of the church in his day, and by reflecting helps on its 
development. We hardly can imagine that a writer so deservedly despised 
in his own day will be highly esteemed in ours. All I can do is to cite 
him, and express the hope that the chapter cited may find readers. 



ATTITUDE OF THE CHURCH FATHERS I93 

denotes his office by the terms apxi^^pareia re real ^tSaa/caXia. 
Cyprian, of course, goes further, and his bishop is uniformly 
sacerdos, his associates consacerdotes, and the presbyters 
are cum episcopo sacerdotaJi honore conjuncH.^ Of the an- 
cient "holy" or ''royal" priesthood, which was common to 
all believers, he appears never to have thought, but to the 
bishops he applies the Mosaic ordinances relative to the 
tribe of Levi and the house of Aaron .f In the Apostolic 
Constitutions the bishop is frequently designated lepeix;^'^ 
and twice apxtepev^.^ These terms signified not onty 
the rise of a priesthood within a once priestless religion, 
but the genesis of a new order of ideas. Obedience ceased 
to be moral and became legal, worship ceased to be spiritual 

* Epp. Ixi., iii., Ixv. Professor E. W. Watson, in an essay on " Cyprian's 
Style and Language" in Studia Biblica, iv. 189-317, says that " four terms 
are used for bishop." " Episcopus," "Sacerdos" have "only this one 
sense." "Sacerdos" is often used simply "because the name involved 
an argument and a claim" (pp. 257, 258). ' 

f Epp. i., ii, iii. ; iv. vi. ; Ixv. ; Ixvi. ; Ixvii. ; Ixxii. ; Ixxiii, Dr. 
E. W. Benson, who, as we read on his title page, was_ "sometime 
Archbishop of Canterbury," says with equal grace and generosity: "It 
is comprehensible how the sentence of Cyprian" — which I understand 
to refer to a sentence at the top of the page : Episcopatus unus, episco- 
porum multorum concordi numerositate diffusus — " could be vivisected 
and injected with corruption till it seemed to yield a sense contrary to its 
original force .... and to the leading idea of its author. But that Ter- 
tullian's scornful parody of some Bishop of Rome's assumption — Pontifex 
scilicet maximus, quod est episcopus episcoporum, edicit — should have 
worked round into becoming the actual title and style of his successor 
{sic), exhibits a feat of that brilliant imagination which even itself could 
never have realized," page 197. He does not quote after TertuUian (De 
Pudic) the edict which remitted the penalties of adultery and fornica- 
tion " over which no woman could write honum factum." Much, however, 
maybe forgiven to a man who has the courage to say that neither "in 
the Apostolic Fathers nor in Justin, nor in Clement of Alexandria," is 
there any clear development of their opinions on priesthood, while as 
to Cyprian "the Bishop is the sacrificing priest," and the priests "of the 
Jewish functions were our predecessors," 31-9; and what is that but to 
say what has here been argued ? 

X E.g. ii. 27 ; 34, 35-6 ; iii. 9 is against the function of women in 
baptism, and is an excellence of how the history and legislation of the 
O.T. governed those of the N.T. (xi. 15, 18). § ii. 27-57. 

o 



194 CATHOLICISM MORE A PRODUCT OF THE HIERARCHICAL 

and became sacerdotal. There cannot be a sacerdotium with- 
out a sacrificium, and so new modes and kinds of sacrifice 
had to be invented that the priesthood might live. All 
that Christ most hated in Judaism entered and took posses- 
sion of the faith that called itself by His name. His Church 
ceased to be a society of the like-minded, where the freedom 
of the Spirit reigned, and became a stupendous sacerdotal 
civitas, or State, where the priesthood claimed to be dispen- 
satores Dei,^ and governed in His name for their own ends. 
2. This attempt to describe the process and analyze the 
courses and conditions of early ecclesiastical development 
has already led us too far, and we must not allow it to 
tempt us to go farther. Enough to say, everything favoured 
the growth of the hierarchic polity. The dream of universal 
empire that Rome had so nearly realized supplied the 
Roman church with an ideal; over against the Civitas 
Roma rose the Civitas Dei, making men its citizens by bap- 
tism, now a priestly rite, and giving to the enfranchised a title 
to heaven. As the Empire decayed, the church stepped 
into its place; as the one decreased, the other increased 
in its ability to maintain order. The more its politico- 
sacerdotal agencies and activities were exercised, the more 
they were developed . The supremacy of Rome passed to the 
church ; the Pope superseded Caesar, and exercised ecclesias- 
tical functions, more imperial than any political functions 
his predecessor had ever exercised. Culture had died, and 
with it criticism — which, even when severest and least 
friendly, is most serviceable to the church, which is ever more 
able to dispense with the apologies of her sons than with the 
criticisms of her enemies. States and dynasties were too 
unstable and short-lived to offer resistance to her arro- 
gant claims. Civil power was ever changing hands, new 
provinces or peoples were ever coming suddenly to the front, 

* Cyprian, Ep. lix. 7. 



POLITY THAN OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION I95 

and were ever being as suddenly forced to the rear. But 
above all changes the church sat, watching all, profiting by 
all, multiplying her sensuous sanctities, enacting and en- 
forcing her sacerdotal laws. 

V 

I. But now these historical discussions have only helped 
to bring us face to face with our real problem. How did these 
changes affect the religion of Christ? Did they only the 
better preserve it, or did they work a revolution in the reli- 
gion, suppressing, where they did not supersede, its most dis- 
tinctive qualities ? These are here the really determinative 
questions. It is a small thing to prove that a given church 
has a continuous history, that it has an unbroken tradition, 
that its teachers stand in the direct line of descent from 
the apostles ; the cardinal and conclusive matter is to prove 
that this history has been a continuous growth in the 
religion, and not in any vital respect away from it. It is 
a matter most insignificant to make out that a given polity 
was the polity of the primitive churches; but it were a 
matter of the very highest moment to make out that the 
polity of these churches is the permanent polity, because 
the most fitting vehicle for the realization of the religion 
they were founded by and founded for. The polity of a 
church can never be divorced from the faith it professes, 
for it means, if it means anything, the application of its 
religious principles and ideals to society, and their applica- 
tion in the form, not simply most suited to the society, but 
best adapted to secure their realization. This is the only 
point of view from which we care to discuss the question of 
ecclesiastical polity, because the only one that does j ustice to 
the sphere and mission of the churches. What does not deal 
with them as the living prophets of the Eternal, the active 



196 THE PROBLEM AS TO THE RELIGION OF CHRIST 

and beneficent representatives of Christ, the expositors in 
word and act of the Divine idea for humanity, does not deal 
with them according to their intrinsic nature. But this 
involves the very essence of our contention — the polities of 
the churches must be studied through the religion of Christ, 
must be appraised and judged by their ability to articu- 
late His truth, incarnate His Spirit, and realize His ends. 

We come, then, back to our problem — How did the 
evolution of the sacerdotal polity affect the Church as the 
vehicle and exponent of the religion of Christ? Let us 
attempt briefly to answer this question as regards certain 
of the most distinctive features in what we may term (i) the 
doctrine ; (2) the ethics ; and (3) the politics of the religion. 

I . Doctrine. Faith was here cardinal and apostolic. In 
its most general sense it meant the free and rational receptiv- 
ity of man, standing, open and trustful, before the spontane- 
ous and redemptive energies of Deity. These energies as 
collective yet personal were termed "the grace of God." 
This is the happiest phrase ever coined to express as 
a unity the relation between the Divine essence and the 
Divine will, or the beatitude and the benevolence of 
God, to denote that glad necessity of nature which 
determines a Being of infinite happiness to create happi- 
ness, and seek to save His creatures from the misery 
they themselves had caused. And the God of Christ 
and His apostles was "the God of all grace," which means, 
that He was a God whose joy was to create joy; but the 
only joy possible to Him and His creatures was where they 
consciously stood in the most personal and trustful relations 
to each other. The man who did not believe could have no 
joy in God; the man who has no joy in God forbids, as it 
were, God to have joy in him. Hence grace had as its 
necessary correlative, faith. Where faith did not stand first 



AND FAITH AND GRACE 197 

in the order of human duties, grace could not stand first in 
the order of Divine truths. Hence the apostles preached a 
grace which demanded faith, or the response of the soul in 
filial trust to the beneficent self-communication of God. 
But faith implies the exercise of thought. To ask it is to 
appeal to the reason, to seek to persuade it, as independent 
and free, by reasonable words in the methods of reason. 

And the apostolic preachers were most reasonable men ; 
the greatest of them was one of the supreme dialecticians of 
the world. They held that ' ' without faith it was impossible 
to please God."* For on faith everything depended, and 
out of it all issued. '*By faith" men were "justified 
with God," t "saved,"J *'renewed,"§ *' sanctified."! | The 
only righteousness God approved was the righteousness of 
faith. ^ And the whole notion of religion stood connected 
with this central idea. It was a matter of the Spirit ; the 
spiritual man was the religious man ; ** and the men of faith 
were the men of God, who had done His will and His work 
in the world. 

Now how did the sacerdotal polity affect doctrine, es- 
pecially the doctrines of grace and faith ? Did it preserve 
to them the place, the prominence, the functions they held 
in the apostolic age? This was the very thing it did not, 
nor for three reasons could it afford to do: (i) In place 
of the immediate relation of God and the soul, it had 
to substitute a mediate relation, worked through its 

* Heb. xi. 6. Cf. John xiv. i ; xvi. 9; xvii. 20-21. 

•j- Rom. V. I ; iii. 28 ; Gal. ii. 16; iii. 11. | Eph. ii. 8 ; Acts xvi. 31. 

§ I John V. I. II Acts xxvi. 18 ; John xvii. 17. 

Tl Rom. i. 17 ; ix. 30 ; x. 3, 4 ; Phil. iii. 9. 

** If one would know what religion is and how faith can make a man 
religious, one must study Heb. xi. The best commentary I know on this 
particular chapter has no special connection with it. It is contained in 
the De Civitate Libb., xv.-xviii. Cf. Rom. iii. 26-31 ; viii. 1-9; Gal. iii. 
7-8, 24-26, 28-29. 



198 THREE THEOLOGICAL POSITIONS AND THE RELIGION. 

organized polity, which promised to accomplish this through 
authorized mediators. Here, then, three positions are 
affirmed, any one of which will involve the repeal of Christi- 
anity as the primitive church knew it . (a) The apotheosis of 
the polity, which cannot be done without lessening the pre- 
eminence and power of Christ. (/3) The mediator who can- 
not step into his position unless Christ steps out of His ; and 
(7) The mediator who must be ''authorized," and, in order 
to his being, the community must be unified and made 
capable of speech. The unity must therefore be one of two 
sorts, either local, where the church is represented by the 
bishop, or universal, where the church is symbolized in the 
Pope, (ii) In order to the adequacy of either form the 
church must be believed to be in the possession of sacra- 
ments which it and those it authorizes are alone able to 
administer. And the Head must be able to speak and to act 
in the manner of a collective society — a condition fatal to the 
local idea. Hence the church had to substitute for the direct 
appeal of the truth to the reason, the word of authority ; and 
the voice of God was muffled and muzzled by the voice of 
the church, (iii) The church had to affirm a j ustification by 
sacraments, and deny a justification by faith; and in so 
affirming it declared as its faith a grace that lives in and works 
through ritual which was but the elaborate impotence of 
man, not the spontaneous beneficence and power of God. 
The new polity was the repeal of the apostolic doctrine ; and 
if the doctrine was necessary to the religion of Christ, the 
polity was fatal to it. 

2. As to the ethics, it will be enough to note two 
points, (i) The first concerns a most remarkable quality 
of Christ's teaching, what may be termed its inwardness. 
The great matter was not what a man did, but what he 
was. The doing would be right were the being right. Alms 



RELIGIOUS ETHICS AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH 199 

before men, prayers in the temple and at the street corners, 
phylacteries or pious formulae of any kind, fasts, care for 
ceremonial purifications and practices — these and such-like 
were to Him no religious virtues, only masks and mockeries, 
''dead works" that usurped the place of living obedience to 
God and beneficent duties to man. His own ideal was — a 
man with light and life within, determined in all his actions 
by love, jealous of the ostentatious and ceremonial, sus- 
picious of a goodness according to rule and custom, culti- 
vating his spirit and doing his works in secret, perfect as God 
is perfect, full of all ethically holy activities, yet possessing 
and enjoying the sweet and sane and familiar humanities. 

Now what are the temper and moral tendencies of 
an elaborately organized society at once sacerdotal and 
political? Exactly those which Christ most resisted, 
hated, suffered from — those which most seek to compel 
a uniform ceremonial or outward obedience, and which 
identify ritual and rules with right conduct, sensuous 
worship with living obedience. And what are the virtues 
which such ritual and rules must produce, cultivate, and 
praise? Precisely those that Christ held to be most unreal, 
the mimicry and counterfeit of the true and the good. This 
applies not simply to the kind of things that come to be es- 
teemed virtuous, like penances and repetition of formulated 
and prescribed prayers ; but also to virtues that seem more 
distinctly moral. Submission may, under certain condi- 
tions, be a very excellent quality ; but if it be exaggerated it 
tends to become a positive vice. The man who makes a 
complete surrender of his conscience to his superior and re- 
gards himself as a simple vehicle or agent of his superior's 
will, ceases to be, in the true sense, a moral man; he re- 
nounces knowledge of the inward law Jesus so laboured to 
make articulate and obedience to the living God who speaks 



200 UNIVERSAL DUTY AND PRIESTHOOD: 

in it. As Augustine said of fallen man, he so forsook God 
that God forsook him ; for all evil is of man, as all good is 
of God ; and evil has no ameliorative or redemptive power. 
Terence can teach us that even love has its vices and its 
pains : Injurice, suspiciones, inimiciticE, helium, pax rursum.^ 
And did not Tully say, that the open adversary could be 
resisted, while evil, which had made its home with man, 
could not ? And did not Luther say, that what was contrary 
to the will was also contrary to the truth of God ; for obedi- 
ence has care, while submission had none? And absolute 
submission is the attitude not simply of the Jesuit to his 
superior, but of every man who places his soul in the 
hands of a spiritual director, to whom he makes confession, 
through whom he receives absolution, and in conformity to 
whose expressed will he undertakes to walk. The inward- 
ness Christ required is not possible to him — the light is not 
inner, the life is not inner; the truth he knows does not* 
''make him free"t and become within a ''well of water 
springing up unto everlasting life, "J and his virtues are not 
such as become a kingdom which is "righteousness and 
peace and joy in the Holy Ghost." § 

(ii) The second point to be noted in the primitive and 
apostolical ethics is for our discussion even more significant ; 
for it touches the very heart of the idea of religion and 
religious service. As Christ and the apostles spiritualized 
the idea of the priesthood, they spiritualized also the idea 
of sacrifice. These two, indeed, must always correspond. 
Where the priesthood is sensuous or carnal, sacrifice must 
be the same, and so if either becomes spiritual the other 
must be made spiritual as well. In harmony with this 
necessity the sacrifices of the New Testament are all ethical, 

* Eun., act i, sc. i, lines 14-16; A pud de civitate, xix. 5. 
f John viii. 32. { John iv. 14. § Rom. xiv. 17. 



ETHICS AND SACRIFICE IN THE NEW TESTAMENT 20I 

forms in which man expresses his obedience to God, or the 
complete surrender of himself and all he has to the Divine 
will. Men who present their bodies a " living sacrifice " offer 
what is **holy and acceptable unto God," perform what 
is in its nature a service of reason * The sacrifices with 
which ''God is well pleased" are beneficence and charity .f 
The **holy priesthood" are, indeed, expressly chosen "to 
ofTer up spiritual sacrifices." J ** Praise" is a '' sacrifice, "§ 
and the spontaneous gifts of love are "an odour of sweet 
smell, a sacrifice acceptable, well-pleasing to God." || The 
most Jewish writer in the New Testament emphasizes these 
ideas in his definition of "pure religion and undefiled"; 
it knows neither sacerdotalism nor legalism, but is simply 
"to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and 
to keep himself unspotted from the world." 1[ 



VI 

I . Now if we turn from the New Testament to a writer 
still so intrinsically and essentially apostolical as Cyprian, 
the nature and bearing of the change worked by the 
sacerdotal idea becomes at once apparent. The spiritual 
idea which we have seen to be everywhere in the New Testa- 
ment may be said to have vanished; the priesthood of 
the bishops has superseded the priesthood of believers, 
and the bread and wine of the supper, so far as the body 
and blood of Christ are identical with them, have become 
the true and only sacrifice. The supper is the sacrificium 
dominicum, instituted by Christ in His capacity of High 
Priest, offered by the bishop, as the vicarious priest, to 
God the Father, as Christ originally had been. The cele- 

* Rom. xii. i. f Heb. xiii. i6. J i Peter ii. 5. 

§ Heb. xiii. 15. || Phil. iv. 18. ^ James i. 27. 



202 CYPRIAN AND THE THEORY OF SACRIFICE. 

bration of the supper is a sacrificium Dei Patris et Christie 
the wine is Vinum calicis dominici sanguinis, and so he 
can say passio est domini sacrificium, quod offerimus.^ 
The revolution is as complete as it is disastrous; the 
apostolical idea is not only lost, but replaced by an idea 
that is its very contradiction. The primitive idea was 
full of splendid ethical meaning, and so of immense moral 
energy. It made obedience the only sacrifice which was 
possible to man and well pleasing to God. It made con- 
duct the body of religion and its soul love to man. It thus 
bound faith and action, believing and living, the grace of 
God and the service of man in holy and indissoluble bonds. 
It made Christianity the most beneficent power which had 
ever entered the world, a religion which incorporated and 
transfigured morality, which universalized the higher and 
the gentler virtues, which made all the religious forces of 
life and thought moral forces and turned the most pious 
into the most virtuous and saintly man. But the sacer- 
dotal revolution reversed all this, divorced sacrifice from 
the life, made it sensuous, a thing created by an institution, 
offered by an order, capable of all the abuses that made 
religion and morality not only distinct, but constant and 
inveterate foes. To the religion of Christ, Jesuit casuistry, 
which is only the applied morality of scientific sacerdotalism, 
is radically alien. 

2. The sacerdotal polity even more completely changed 
and depraved the social ideal of Christ and His apostles. 
That ideal was a free spiritual brotherhood, where 
men lived in the spirit and walked by it. Clergy and 

* Ep. Ixiii. 4, 5, 6, 9, 17 (Ox. Ed.). This whole epistle, Ad Cacilium de 
Sacramento Domini Calicis, is an extremely instructive study. It shows how 
completely the New Testament idea of Christian sacrifice had been meta- 
morphosed, and with what subtle and fantastic ingenuity the history of the 
Old Testament could be used to foist doctrines into the New. 



203 

laity did not stand sharply opposed to each other, distin- 
guished and divided by official, which are ever fictitious, 
sanctities; nay, clergy and laity did not even exist then. 
The most eminent distinctions were moral, the best gifts 
spiritual, and possible to all. The man who lived nearest 
to God stood highest among men ; he who loved most lived 
the best. Office carried with it no special sanctity, sanctity 
only qualified for office. The supreme thing was the 
incorporation of the ethical ideal in a spiritual common- 
wealth, where the good of each was the aim and joy of all; 
and each had his place and function in the society deter- 
mined by the gift which manifested the grace of God. 
Regarded as to its internal relations, it was a family, a 
brotherhood, a household of faith ; * studied from the 
standpoint of its privileges and liberties, it was an eKKXTjo-Ca, 
or society of the enfranchised, where every man was a free 
citizen;! conceived in its relation to God, it could be 
variously described, as a ''kingdom," an '* elect people," 
a ''royal priesthood," or a "temple built of living stones."} 
The last aspects are signally significant ; where the temple 
is spiritual, built of living stones, quickened and glorified by 
the indwelling God, the only sanctity possible is one of 
persons, not of place or rite, or act and symbol. When man 
in Christ became at once the temple and the priesthood, the 
ancient sensuous worship utterly ceased, and the only 
sacrifices acceptable to God were those of living obedience 
and holy will. 

But the essential elements in this social ideal are precisely 
the elements cancelled and annihilated by the priestly idea in 



* Eph. iii. 15; I Peter ii. 17; i Thess. iv. 9; Gal. vi. 10; Eph. ii. 19. 
t I Cor. i. 2 ; 2 Cor. viii. 19. 

% John xviii. 36-7; i Peter ii. 9; Titus ii. 14; Heb. viii. 10; i Peter ii. 5, 9; 
Rev. i. 6; I Cor. iii. 16-19; 2 Cor. vi. 16; Eph. iii. 21. 



204 THE CLERGY AND THE BROTHERHOOD. 

all its possible forms. It builds on the distinction between 
clergy and laity, and loves official sanctities as its very 
life. The priesthood becomes a sacred office, the priest a 
sacred person, and ** laymen" belong to the world and are 
concerned with things profane. The clergy constitute the 
church; without them the highest worship is impossible, 
the society being unable to approach God without its priests. 
Sacred orders are fatal to brotherhood; distinct classes, 
not to say castes, forbid fraternity. And the duties they 
enforce are not ethical, but official and artificial. Place 
and function in the society are determined not by the gifts 
of the Spirit, but by the rules and agencies of the order. 
Sacerdotal office does not demand the highest spiritual 
manhood; priests are too easily made to require the 
noblest material for their making. The system that does 
not emphasize the need of the highest spiritual qualities in 
the man concerned with religion, is a bad religious system ; 
and no official priesthood in any religion the world has known 
ever gave to ethics its proper and authoritative place. 
The evolution of sacerdotalism in the Christian Church was 
the death of all the distinctive social and moral elements 
in the religion of Christ. 

It thus seems that the evolution of the organized sacer- 
dotal polity at once superseded and suppressed the elements 
in Christianity that were most distinctively original, and so 
those most decisively emphasized by Christ and His apostles. 
And this is true alike of doctrine and precept, faith and con- 
duct, political ideal and social realization. Can a state 
which realizes what was essential in Judaism and Hellenism 
be judged as just to Christ? 



VI 

HOW OUT OF AN ATTEMPT TO REVIVE THE 
RELIGION OF CHRIST SECTS HAVE COME 

A T this point then we are to be concerned with what is 
"^^^ known as the Reformation. It may be defined as an 
attempt to recover primitive Christianity, with its ideas 
and methods, its doctrines and duties, its truths and 
modes of behaviour. It was an attempt necessarily 
based on the Scriptures, especially those of the New 
Testament. These showed what the original had been, 
what Jesus had said and suffered, done and designed; 
what His apostles thought and taught, attempted 
and achieved. The minds of the Reformers might be 
thus expressed: "In order that it may do its work 
in the world, Christianity must again become the religion of 
Christ." But it was easier to see what was needed than 
to accomplish it. Much, of course, was gained by the 
mere revolt from the sacerdotal polity which had been 
organized into Catholicism. Its strength was broken; it 
might storm as of old, but its thunder had lost its power 
to terrify, and its lightning to smite. 

I 

I. Now, what rose in the revolted provinces was not the 
primitive ideal, but approximations to it. And these 
approximations were more or less remote. The Reformers, 

205 



206 REFORMERS WORKED THROUGH KINGS AND STATES. 

like men everywhere, worked under the Hmitations of time 
and place ; and they did not work alone, but through, and 
along with, and, in certain cases, under Kings and States. 
The Reformer that worked most through and least under a 
State accomplished his work most thoroughly; the Re- 
formers that worked most completely under and for a 
sovereign accomplished the least. The scene of the most 
thorough reformation was Geneva, of the least complete, 
England ; and the difference in mode showed itself in the 
difference in spirit. The result was that in Geneva the 
Reformed church had all the aggressive, zealous, strenuous 
spirit of primitive Christianity, but in England the church 
had almost none of it. There was more apostolic activity 
and purpose in Geneva than in any other city of the 
Reformation. And this is the more remarkable, that, as 
regards population, it was one of the smallest cities, yet in it 
there lived a splendid faith in the truth, in the right of the 
ideal to command the actual, in the formative as in the 
reformative force of religion, in its claim to be in all things 
the creative, constitutive, and normative principle. And 
small Geneva did marvellous things — sent its strong faith 
into France, into Holland, into remote Scotland, invaded 
even Lutheran Germany, and wherever it went it acted 
liked iron in the spiritual blood, raised up massive, heroic 
men, stoical in character, stern in temper, inflexible in 
will, unable to accept defeat, yet in victory ever conscious 
that God alone was victorious. But the Anglican church 
was thoroughly insular, without universal sympathies, lived 
and acted as a church for the English people alone, save 
where here and there touched by Genevan influences, accom- 
plishing the work with as little change as possible, leaving 
as much of the venerable edifice the ages had built as the 
forces at work could be induced to spare. There was no 



THEIR CONSEQUENT INFLUENCE ON REFORMATION 207 

attempt at a return to the religion of Christ, only at the 
re-formation of the church of England. 

And it was a church coextensive and, indeed, identical 
with the State. As Archbishop Whitgift* was never tired 
of saying, there was an extraordinary difference between 
the apostolic times and ours, especially in the church 
and the kind of government it implied and required; for 
in the apostles' day churches were so small that every 
one knew every other and kept on him a watchful eye; 
but now prosperous days have come to the church and 
the numbers which profess Christ are greatly increased. 
Then in no one kingdom, no one city, no one town, did 
the majority of its citizens profess Christ; now whole 
kingdoms, whole cities, whole towns profess Him. As a 
consequence **the church is full of hypocrites, dissemblers, 
drunkards, whoremongers," and such-like. And so the 
church is as the State is, and is *'a field where the devil 
soweth tares as fast as the husbandman good corn." For 
''many are called, but few are chosen." f 

2. The incompleteness of the work of the Reformation in 
England made the church an offence to many consciences. 
The English church seemed so mean and feeble compared 
with the church of Geneva,J and it had been throughout 
so regulated by the spirit of expediency and statecraft, 
that men of a sterner and more ideal faith were irresistibly 
impelled beyond it. The splendid success of the Genevan 
model filled many with admiration; they pleaded in its 
behalf with sovereign and people, and zealously worked for 
its adoption in England. The men who thus pleaded and 

* The Defence of the Answer to the Admonition, Whitgift, Works (Parker 
Society), vol. i, pp. 375-395- 

t Cf. Matt. XX. 16; xxii. 14. 

J It had been said by no less an Englishman than Archdeacon Philpots to 
be "one and catholic and apostolic." — Work, p. 158. 



2o8 PURITAN AND SEPARATIST: PURITANISM. 

worked were offended either at the corruptions, or at the 
church which they held to be mainly responsible for their 
existence. The first class were Puritans; the second be- 
came Separatists. 

(i) What has here to be said as to the Puritans cannot 
be better introduced than in certain words of Whitgift: 
**This name Puritan is very aptly given to these men; 
not because they be pure, no more than were the 
heretics called Cathari ; but because they think themselves 
mundiores ceteris, 'more pure than others,' as the Cathari 
did, and separate themselves from all other churches and 
congregations, as spotted and defiled; because also they 
suppose the church which they have devised to be without 
all impurity." * This is quoted not because approved, but 
because it excellently expresses the spirit of the time, which 
was always merciless, whether it used as its vehicle brutal, 
frank ferocity or cruel innuendo ; and because it shows how 
little the affinity of the Puritan with the Anglican counted, 
and how his distinction from the Separatist was even then 
misunderstood. 

Puritans like Cartwright did not differ from Anglicans 
like Whitgift so much in their notion of the church as 
a State, as in their idea of religion and the ministry .f 

* Ibid., p. 171. Whitgift' s church history is incorrect, especially as 
regards his account of the Cathari. Nobody thinks of assailing them 
as he did. Neither in their case nor in the case of the Puritans was the 
claim made either in themselves or in their societies and churches to be 
" more pure than others." But the question was in no respect personal ; 
it concerned simply the purpose of the gospel and its churches. As 
to the origin of the name in 1564, cf. Thomas Fuller's Church History of 
Great Britain, ix. § i, 66, 67. Fuller has a better sense for the origin and 
meaning of words than Whitgift. He says : " Such as refused the cere- 
monies and discipline were branded with the odious jiame of Puritans." 

•j- Were we to speak of the Puritan in strictly modern terms, we should 
call him a churchman who believed in the religious functions of the State. 
He had no objection to the establishment as an establishment; foi: as " a 
nonconforming conformist" (see Gardiner, History of England, 1603-42^ 



THE PURITAN, THE ANGLICAN, AND THE SEPARATIST 209 

The Puritan, therefore, differed from both the AngHcan and 
the Separatist, while he also agreed with both. He differed 
from the Anglican by affirming, not the supremacy, but 
the sufficiency of the Scripture which set out the polity 
the church was to realize, the ministry it was to organize 
and sanction, how it was to be maintained, what the min- 
isters were to wear, and what to teach as well as preach, 
(ii) But where he agreed with the Anglican he differed 
from the Separatist ; for he held the legitimacy of none but 
a State church or a church founded and endowed and ruled 
by the chief magistrate. He agreed with the Separatist, 
therefore, not in his doctrine of Scripture, which was much 
freer than the Anglican, so much as in the idea of religion 

vol. iii, p. 24T, where he speaks of "Puritan conformists," and says that 
the phrase is used to denote the people who "appear in ecclesiastical 
histories as 'Doctrinal Puritans' ") he was willing to stand within it and 
to work through it, which the Separatist was neither willing nor attempted 
to do. Gardiner has not properly described the Puritan or what he stood 
for ; the name is, he says, " a constant source of trouble to the historian " 
(iii. 241), as if the historian could be either accurate or a maker of litera- 
ture without trouble. If we are right in our description no Puritan as 
such ever stood outside the establishment. He was indeed less a Calvinist 
in theology than a Calvinist in ethics, who, as Gardiner says, "because he 
looked upon the world as the kingdom of God," saw in vision an ideal 
England, sober, temperate, and chaste, "without the riotous festivities 
of Whitehall, and the drunken revelries of the village alehouse "^^ (iii. 242). 
He hated, therefoje, moral corruption and feared its evil effects. As a 
man with a moral nature, he, unlike Whitgift, disliked the immoral 
latitude of the Elizabethan State-church, which, with his antecedents, 
especially those he owed to Geneva and Calvin, he could not but do (see 
Cambridge Modern History, vol. ii, 364-8). It was an act of pure im- 
pertinent irrelevance or of ignorance and consistent lying on the part of 
Richard Montagu to charge the authors of the Lambeth Articles with 
being Puritans. Sanderson, Bishop of Lincoln, named Whitgift, who 
certainly was an author of the Lambeth Articles, the "blessed Arch- 
bishop"; though he, like Calvin himself and Richard Hooker, was an 
Augustinian in theology, yet he had too little moral squeamishness to be 
either a Puritan or shocked at the corruptions of the time, whether in 
church or State. Therefore, we feel that the charge against him and 
Hooker was enough to make both men turn in their graves, for neither 
thought, as Sanderson says, "so much as by dream," that the charge 
was true or possible. 
P 



2IO THE CIVIL MAGISTRATE, HIS PROVINCE AND FUNCTION. 

and of the religious institution, which were to both 
essentially ethical, and also as to its being the duty of the 
civil magistrate, as both Barrowe and Greenwood said, - — 
thus lapsing from Independency, whether historical or 
contemporary, — to "compel all to hear God's Word"; 
where the Puritan differed from the Separatist was as 
regards the power of the civil magistrate **to compel 
any person to be a member of the church," which in- 
volved not only the principle of conversion as a personal 
change ; but also the idea that it did not lie within the 
province or the power of the civil magistrate to exercise 
compulsion in religion. The point of disagreement was 
fundamental. The Puritan was bound, therefore, to 
follow one of two lines: either to develop his idea of 
religion till it became logically complete, when the church 
merged in the State and the religious person in England 
became simply the English citizen ; or to develop the idea 
of religious morality till it became an idea regulative of the 
church as an institution. If the one line was taken he became 
a pronounced and aggressive State churchman; but if he 
followed the other line he became a dissenter and an ex- 
ponent of primitive Christianity as he understood the New 
Testament, especially as regards its doctrine of religion and 
the church. This is the natural history of Puritanism, and 
explains both its emergence and its disappearance. It may 
be said to have lasted from 1570 — though, according to 
Thomas Fuller, 1564 is more correct, yet the first 
edition of the Admonition to Parliament was published as 
late as 1571 — till 1660 and 1662, the years, respectively, 
of the Restoration and the Act of Uniformity. With 
Charles the Second's return and the reestablishment of the 
State on a regal basis, Puritanism ceased to be, and was 
either absorbed into legal uniformity or became Presby- 



THE SAME QUESTIONS IN CHURCH AND STATE 211 

terian. What England knew under that name is a system 
which has leaned more to the national than to the individual 
profession of religion. 

Now the political questions which agitated the minds 
of men in the church were the same as in the State : What is 
the ''tenure " of kings and magistrates, archbishops, bishops, 
and deans? Do they rule and legislate by hereditary right, 
or as representatives? If as the last, whom do they repre- 
sent? Christ, the King, and His Apostles? Or the people? 
If Christ and His Apostles, then they ought to be as He 
and they are not; but if the people, then law comes in, and 
it follows that the higher the representative the more is he 
bound by the law which created him. The Puritan like 
Whitgift assumed two fundamental positions: (i) that 
every church was national, and that to show any church 
to be a mere denomination was to prove it false; and 
(ii) that every person who belonged to a kingdom, a 
city, a town, or a parish, belonged to its church, and the 
church, like the State, had to legislate for the citizens as a 
whole. Where Puritan and Anglican differed was on three 
points : (a) as regards the Scriptures, which Cartwright held 
to formulate the only true polity to which all churches ought 
to conform. Hence he said, ''We must have a right minis- 
try of God, and a right government of His church, according 
to the Scriptures set up ; or else there can be no right religion, 
nor yet for contempt thereof can God's plagues be from us 
any while deferred." And again, "Nothing should beplaced 
in the church, save that God hath in His word commanded," 
though Cartwright made a remarkable and strong dis- 
tinction between "placed in the church by the com- 
mand of God" and tolerated in the church. (/3) As 
regards the ministry of the church, which Cartwright said 
ought to be a presbytery, where all were equal, not a priest- 



212 THE PURITAN INCAPABLE OF CONNIVING AT IMMORALITY. 

hood, which implied the inequaHty both inner and outer of 
each member; and therefore the inequity of the author of 
nature, who wrote two inconsistent laws, the one on the 
fleshy tables of the heart, the other in His Word. And 
so (a) and (0) coalesced. (7) As regards its respon- 
sibility for the moral integrity of every person within 
it. What shocked the Puritan was the corruption con- 
nived at; and what he sought was to make the church 
an engine for the reformation of morals and manners. 
Hence we read in the Admonition: ''Seeing that nothing 
in this mortal life is more diligently to be sought for, 
and carefully to be looked unto, than the restitution 
of true religion and reformation of God's church, it 
shall be your parts, dearly beloved, in this present parlia- 
ment assembled, as much as in you lieth to promote the 
same, and to employ your whole labour and study, not only 
in abandoning all popish remnants both in ceremonies and 
regiment, but also in bringing in and placing in God's 
church those things only which the Lord Himself in His 
word commandeth ; because it is not enough to take pains 
in taking away evil, but also to be occupied in placing good 
in the stead thereof." 

n 

I. Where the Separatist differed from the Puritan, there- 
fore, was not in the objection to an incomplete reform 
of morals, but in his idea of the cause of immorality, 
which he held to be the church as a church. Men 
must proceed not by admonitions or appeals to Parlia- 
ment but to the People; men must be revered as men. 
Hence it became evident to the Separatist that Geneva 
had gone to work in the wrong way, had alike in its 
ideal and its method gone beyond the New to the Old 



THE SEPARATIST CONCEIVES A CHRISTIAN STATE 213 

Testament. Its aim had been to realize a Mosaic rather 
than a Christian State, to fulfil the dream of David more 
than of Paul, to institute a Oeo/cparia rather than an eKKXriala 
or an assembly of free and enfranchised Christian men. 
The new ideal was a return to the religion of Christ, 
to the method and aims of His apostles. The primitive 
simplicity was held to be the secret of primitive power; 
to depend on the civil magistrate, to work by his arm and 
through his agents, meant to be commanded by his ex- 
pediencies rather than by Christ's mind and truth. The 
kingdom of God was a kingdom of the godly ; the Church of 
Christ was a society of Christian men. It must be enlarged 
and maintained in His way, not in the way of Queen Elizabeth 
or James the First. The Church of Christ in England could 
not be a creation of the sovereign of England, to be changed 
and arranged as a much marrying Henry or a fanatical 
Mary might determine. It was Christ's, and His way must 
be followed if His ideal was to be realized. And what was 
His way? He did not ask Herod, who was quite as respect- 
able a person as Henry, to help Him. He did not implore 
the consent and aid of the chief priests, who were in their 
own place and day quite as potent and capable persons 
as the Anglican bishops. He did not appeal for counsel 
and cooperation to Pilate, who, measured by his age and 
people, was at any rate the equal of Thomas Cromwell. But 
He created His Church by the words which expressed His 
ideal. He preached His truth on the hill-side, or the Galilean 
lake, or by its shore, to the publican sitting at the receipt of 
custom or looking down from the sycamore tree, to the 
few who met in the home of women who loved much, to 
the crowds that gathered round Him in the way, or in 
the temple, or in the chief places of concourse; and out 
of the men who heard, believed, and obeyed, His kingdom 



214 Christ's Christianity the alone true. 

was constituted, His church formed. None but those who 
were "of the truth "still heard His voice. To use the agencies 
and instruments of imperial Rome or of sacerdotal Judea 
would have made His kingdom a ''kingdom of this world" 
rather than of heaven. And as with Him, so with His 
apostles ; they were preachers, who created churches by the 
word of the Cross and out of men who believed. Peter 
might be condemned by the great council to silence ; but he 
declared that he must ''obey God rather than men," and 
could not "but speak the things which he had heard."* 
Paul might reason with Felix ; but it was of ' ' righteousness, 
temperance, and judgment to come," f not about the most 
fitting way of establishing churches. 

And, it was argued then, as now, the only true Chris- 
tianity is Christ's; the only right method the method 
followed by Him and His apostles. Restore the truth and 
way of the New Testament and the glory of the apostolic 
age will return. 

2. This roughly and dimly, but truly, represents the mind 
of the early Congregationalists. J Their aim was to realize 

* Acts iv. 19-20. 

f Acts xxiv. 25. 

I The term " Congregationalists " is here used advisedly and in con- 
trast to "Independents." Between the names there is a quite per- 
ceptible historical distinction. It is not only that Americans like the 
late Dr. Dexter prefer "Congregational" to "Independent," while the 
English historian prefers "Independent" to "Congregational" ; nor that 
according to a recent note the words differ, "Congregational" referring 
more to the sort of persons grouped in the church, " Independent" to the 
polity under which they are grouped, the constitution which makes the 
church free and sets it in contrast to the State. "Congregational" as a 
term rose at a time when " church " as a term was under a ban ; and " con- 
gregation" denoted the local church as community rather than building. 
" Independent " rose at a time when the hand of the State lay heavy upon 
"the tender conscience," and freedom to profess religion was craved by 
religious men. Hence the American, who is free-born and has the love of 
freedom in his blood, thinks of the society and loves the term " Congre- 



SEPARATIST IDEA OF CHURCH AND RELIGION 215 

the ideal of the apostoHc age, to follow Christ's way in order 
that they might reach His religion. It is a great mistake 
to imagine that their notion was exhausted in the thesis — 
the apostolic polity is the authoritative and normative 
polity for all time. Their contention really was : — We can- 
not get at the apostolic religion without going back to the 
apostolic polity; it must be restored if the religion which 
Christ instituted and His apostles preached is to be attained. 
In their idea of the Church there were four determinative 
elements. A church is (a) a society of the godly, or of men 
who truly believe and piously live. (13) It is a society 
instituted expressly to realize in the personal and collective 
life the religious ideals of Christ. (7) It is capable of exten- 
sion only by means that produce faith, and of development 
only by agencies that create godliness. (S) It is autonomous 
and authoritative, possessed of the freedom necessary to 
the fulfilment of its mission, the realization of its ideals; 
and it is endowed with all the legislative and administra- 
tive powers needed for the maintenance of order and the 
attainment of progress. In their idea of religion, with such 
changes of form and emphasis as the differences made 
necessary, the same four elements reappeared. Godliness 
was a matter for the individual conscience ; its realization 
was the most general and the most imperative of duties; 
its extension was the common obligation of the godly alone ; 
and its sovereignty over every godly man and society was 
absolute and supreme. These ideas were all organically 

gational" ; and the Englishman, who admires those who struggled in the 
past for the freedom he enjoys in the present, thinks of the polity and 
loves the term "Independent." The " Congregationalists " were first, 
and the "Independents" rose in history later, about the time of the 
Westminster Assembly. For the distinction between "Congregational" 
and "Independent," see the late Dr. R. W. Dale, History of English 
Congregationalism, pp. 374-7^; and Dexter's Congregationalism as seen in 
its Literature, pp. 49, 114, 523, 631-34, 656-60, 672-73. 



2l6 BROWNE FOUNDER OF MODERN INDEPENDENCY. 

connected ; they represented no sectional nostrums, but a 
complete ideal of man, society and religion, of the way and 
the end of Christ. In these ideas Robert Browne,* Henry 

* (A) Robert Browne was a member of a well-known family in Rutland- 
shire, near of kin, as Cecil himself confessed, to the Lord Treasurer. He 
had taken his degree at Cambridge about 1570, and for almost ten years 
he led a broken and rather wandering life. He became a ducal chaplain, 
a schoolmaster, a preacher in various churches, and finally he studied 
theology under Richard Greenham, Rector of Dey Drayton, where he, 
according to Neal, was suspended and silenced by Cox of the Frankfort 
troubles, then Bishop of Ely. The vicarage was near Cambridge, where 
Dr. Still, Master of Trinity, heard Browne preach, and predicted disturb- 
ance to the church. From Greenhard he learned some valuable lessons ; 
(a) that in the eyes of God sin was more odious than ridiculous ; {j3) the 
poor were, in spite of their poverty, the brothers of the rich ; (7) that a 
roof must be built as well as foundations laid, since both were equally 
necessary ; (5) that for a man to be driven into the ministry by hunger 
was good neither for the man nor the ministry nor the church he en- 
deavoured to serve ; (e) that an evil minister is a devil's tool, for " the 
fountain is poisoned, and a poisoned fountain means that all who drink 
at it die. Such ministers are like bells calling out to others places where 
they never themselves come ; like to black soap which made white, while 
it remained black ; like to blunt whetstones, which sharpen other things, 
while continuing dull ; like to rough ragged files, which smoothed other 
things, but remained rough themselves ; like to Noah's shipwrights, 
which made the ark, but themselves were not saved in it {Works of 
Richard Greenham, p. 400). In a ministry like the Anglican, which was 
blind and dumb, young men might enter in haste, and know neither 
" staidness and moderation, nor experience and gravity in ordering affec- 
tions" {Ibid., p. 24 ; see also p. 519). (f) He was marked by equal zeal, 
(i) against non-residence, a flagrant and clamant evil, and (ii) in favour of an 
almost Puritan strictness of conduct, which tempted Thomas Fuller to say, 
"His sermons were lived before they were preached" (ix, § vii. 64-69). 
{7]) He was also distinguished by zeal, (i) for the rest and quiet of the 
Sabbath, and (ii) against ecclesiastic polity which men were apt to 
over-estimate the importance of ; for they tended to know many things 
rather than themselves. Browne, then, was under a good master ; and 
over and above he had in him the preacher's passion, by which he felt, 
as John Wesley did, that " the whole world was his parish " ; and this 
induced him not only to preach against subjection to bishops, but also 
to decline for himself an episcopal license. Once Browne's years of 
apprenticeship and wandering were concluded, he became a minister to 
independent churches, successively, at Norwich and Middelburg, in Holland, 
whence he passed into England by way of Scotland. In those, years, 
about six, he made some discoveries, and by putting them into writing, 
he gave his name to a system. He had not stood still. Experience had 



CONGREGATIONAL SYSTEM NAMED AFTER ITS FOUNDER 217 

Barrowe, John Greenwood,t John Penry,J together with 

taught him. Cartwright, as became a Puritan, stood by the principle of 
establishment, which Browne relinquished, holding that reformation 
should be, as he phrased it, " by persons rather than by parishes." In 
his famous treatise, published 1582, i?e/o;'ma^zow without tarrying for anie, 
he speaks strongly about the wickedness of those preachers who did not 
so preach as to convert men, but waited till the magistrate compelled them 
to attend the parish church. This remarkable treatise, though written 
by a man who himself conformed, was, therefore, a piece of early non- 
conformist literature. He expressed the idea that the church was simply 
a " gathered company of Christian men," who had willingly placed them- 
selves under the government of God, and had promised to keep His law. 
There is in the Lambeth Library, bound up with an old copy of the treatise 
on " Reformation," a work which bears the title of A Book which showeth 
the Life and Manners of all true Christians, and how unlike they are to 
Turks and Papists and Heathen folk. This work defines the church, as 
well as some positions which Browne had strongly emphasised : — (i) the 
church is a body of men under the government of God ; (ii) this ideal 
determines a second, which is concerned with the government of the 
church. This cannot be of any human lordship or any manlike sovereignty, 
since the church is composed of Christians or converted men ; (iii) the 
people constitute a kingdom ; (iv) a pastor is said to be a person who has 
office of God for which he is fit ; (v) similarly a teacher is a person who 
has a message direct from God ; and (vi) an elder is defined as a person 
who has of&ce of oversight and counsel. Hence under the idea of the 
church an idea of religion is subsumed, (a) The civil ruler or sovereign, 
in his capacity as magistrate, has no ecclesiastical authority. He cannot 
compel a soldier to be a minister, or a preacher to give over his calling and 
exchange it for another. If he does, it is the bounden duty of men to 
disobey him. (/3) The sovereign has his limits ; as regards things of 
this world men must revere and obey him, but as regards things divine 
no magistrate as such can set himself above God. But (7) the theory, as 
a whole, involved more than a limitation of power on the part of the civil 
magistrate, because magistrates who were against the church were also 
against religion. The conception thus involved the inter-relation of 
religion and the church ; as was the one so was the other. Hence both 
had to be qualified as Christian ; the church was composed only of men 
who embodied the Christian religion. And so (5) there followed from the 
limitation of the ecclesiastical authority of the civil magistrate toleration 
in religion. Both were rigorously maintained ; the authority of the 
magistrate in his own province was supreme, but toleration was based on 
the reality of religion and the rationality of man. 

(B) Brownism and Brownist were popular names for the system 
Robert Browne advocated. It stood opposed (i) to Puritanism. In 
1582, according to Thomas Fuller, Browne addressed a letter to Walter 
Travers, wherein he claimed Cartwright as agreeing in general with the 
Genevan theory that the Genevan state is co-extensive with the Genevan 



2l8 BROWNISH OPPOSED TO ENGLAND AND GENEVA. 

Francis Johnson, § Henry Ainsworth, John Robinson, and 

Church. It forms, therefore, an admirable point from which our dis- 
cussion as to Brownism may start. There was expressed in the letter 
what Fuller terms " the secret sympathy between England and Geneva " ; 
and he gives us as the reason why no English bishop had any sympathy 
with Geneva, that the exiles of the Marian days were all dead, and a 
generation had arisen which had neither affection for the Genevan govern- 
ment nor obligation to it. Brownism seemed to him to confound 
things so different and distinguishable as discipline and law, though as 
controversy then was, that did not matter. Discipline was Christian and 
stood related to disciple ; law was natural, and Mosaic. Discipline as 
Christian belonged to the church, and was very partially represented by 
excommunication as by other disciplinary acts ; while law was as old as 
nature and co-extensive with the race. We may say, then, (ii) that 
Brownism, as distinguished from Puritanism, laid stress on religion as 
something natural to man. And Whitgift, when he said that he knew no 
difference between a Christian Commonwealth and a Christian church, 
confessed the faith of Puritanism and Cartwright. Here we reach the 
fundamental point of controversy between Browne and Cartwright. 
Brown recognized that a man was proved to be a Christian by his virtues ; 
and he held that without conversion there could be no Christian man. 
Cartwright and Travers, who were, as Fuller said, both " eloquent ken- 
ners," and whom he respectively named the " head " and the " neck " 
of what he termed the " presbyterian party," which was his name for 
the Puritanism which held that a man was made Christian by the at- 
mosphere in which he lived and the action of the whole on him, as dis- 
tinguished from Browne's theory which said, the action of the individual 
upon the whole is primary. But (iii) while Cartwright and Travers agreed 
with Whitgift that there were advantages in a national profession of 
the Christian religion and so in a national establishment, Brownism stood 
distinguished from both Puritan and Anglican by holding individualism 
as a fixed first principle, and therefore the duty of beginning with the 
individual and ending with the society. And this seemed to him an 
advantage which accrued to church and to religion alike from freedom. 
What was called Brownism was, indeed, specially offensive to the men 
of the time ; and they were men who spoke their mind with extraordinary 
plainness and directness, yet we must protest against the endurance of 
injustice. And the injustice is twofold : (a) it is general, and consists 
mainly in regarding the Puritan as a dissenter, which he is not, and the 
source of modern dissent, which he is known not to be. But (^) it is 
also particular, and consists in what may be termed a misconception of 
Brownism, which may be seen if one turns to the " General Index " of 
the Parker Society Publications. There is nothing less true than that 
Brownism regarded any church member as a private person, or a church 
as a private association ; the one was a minister, the other a custodian 
of truth, which was a public possession because the property of all 
men. 



I 



POSITIONS OF B ARROWS AND GREENWOOD 21 Q 

Henry Jacob, who were early Congregationalists, agreed. 

f Barrowe and Greenwood are names indissolubly associated. Henry 
Barrowe matriculated at Cambridge, 1566, where he studied law, migrating 
thence to London, where he became a member of Gray's Inn, and lived 
a loose life. While hearing a sermon, he made what Bacon calls " a leap 
from a vain and libertine youth to preciseness " {Observations on a Libel, 
Works, Bohn's'Ed., i, 383). Whether there were, as Bacon testifies, 
" a kind of gospellers called Brownists," " a very small number of very 
silly and base people," is a question that need not be here discussed ; 
but we know that Barrowe — though " a gentleman of a good house " 
and the senior of Greenwood, who had also been at Cambridge, where he 
matriculated about 1 577, and graduated 1 580, and was by ten years younger 
than Barrowe, yet older than he, for he had deepened his interest in re- 
ligion — unlike Greenwood, was never ordained or in any other respect 
made a minister of the church. He went to visit Greenwood, who was in 
prison before him, but was detained and sent to Whitgift at Lambeth, 
where he had to contend on grounds of legality against his detention. The 
two men were early Independents, who had both separated from the church, 
though mainly on the ground of its connection with the state. They dis- 
tinguished between the " parish assemblies " and the " true established 
churches of Christ." While they held that " many precious and elect 
vessels were to be found in every parish, yet it became them not to judge 
in God's stead and name." While they conceded that " the Queen as 
the supreme governor of the whole land had authority over the bodies 
and the goods of the church," they did not think " any prince could 
make laws for it other than Christ Himself had done." Barrowe has left 
a graphic account of what he suffered at the hands of Archbishop Whitgift 
and Bishop Aylmer of London. When asked whether he could come to 
church, he declined, specifying the reasons that made him a separatist : 
(i) " because the profane and wicked of the land are received into it " ; 
(ii) " a false and anti-christian ministry were set over it " ; (iii) " God 
was not rightly worshipped in it " ; (iv) " the church was not governed 
by the testament of Christ, but by Roman canons." He was twitted 
with being the author of a new religion, a dignity he declined. He said 
that " Scripture " abused became " an idol " ; and he regretted that 
" the sword of the Queen should be drawn against her faithful subjects." 
Turning upon Whitgift, he charged him with being " a monster, a miserable 
compound," " neither ecclesiastical nor civil," like to " the second beast 
spoken of in the Revelation" (xiii, 11-14). Greenwood was dealt with 
as Barrowe had been. " Did he hold it lawful to baptize children ? " 
" Thank God, I am no Anabaptist." Charged with having a son un- 
baptized, he replied, " his son had not been baptized because he had been 
in prison." He did not hold a parish to be equal to a church, because he 
said the only condition on which he could recognize a parish as a church 
was that " all the people who dwell in it were faithful to God " ; a man 
being made not by where he lived, but by what he was. When asked 
whether the Queen was " the supreme head of the church, over all causes, 
as well ecclesiastical as civil," Greenwood made reply, " she was the 



220 PENRY AND THE CONGREGATIONAL FATHERS. 

They believed that every society of godly men gathered 

supreme magistrate over all persons, to punish the evil and defend the 
good." " Did she then equally stand over all causes ? " and he replied : 
" No ; the church has only one Head, and His laws may no man alter." 
The two men combined to send a joint letter to Cartwright, protesting 
on grounds of New Testament theory, against the aristocracy of Calvin 
at Geneva. Their idea was that of a church as " a company of faithful 
people, bound to come out of all wickedness and to live in holy obedience." 
Those who composed the Church of England were neither faithful nor 
holy, and they, therefore, declined to hold communion with it. Its 
parish assemblies were too largely made up of " unclean spirits, atheists, 
papists, and heretics." Hence the parish assemblies " deny the right 
of Christ to reign over them." " The sovereign if he will be held a member 
of Christ must be subject to His censure in the church." After a plea for 
a disputation, they were executed in 1593. 

I John Penry was younger than either Barrowe or Greenwood. He 
had been born just when Elizabeth came to the throne, and was said to 
be by birth and nurture a Roman Catholic. He must have surrendered his 
ancestral faith before coming to Cambridge, where he matriculated 1580, 
just as Greenwood was taking his degree. He was suspected of being the 
author and printer of the once famous Mar-Prelate Tracts. He had issued 
an appeal to the Queen to evangelize Wales, where the gentlemen and 
people would support the preachers as men who would bring them good. 
While Penry desired the conversion of Wales, he was not prepared to put 
under a ban his idea of religion. Hence he said that "in all likelihood 
had Queen Mary lived, the Church of England had been the Church of 
Rome" ; and he also asked, " What good the church of God hath taken 
at the Queen's hands ? " and answered, " It hath got outer peace, but hath 
got it with the absence of Christ Jesus and His ordinance." Penry was 
charged with "separating from the society of the Church of England to 
join with the hypocritical and schismatic conventicles of Barrowe and 
Greenwood." His interest was more in the people of Wales than in the 
English church. He is a beautiful character, who suffered much as a 
Welsh patriot; as he himself said, he was "a poor young man, bom and 
bred in the mountains of Wales." In his dying speech he said : "If my 
blood were an ocean sea, and every drop thereof were a life unto me, 
I would give them all, by the help of the Lord, for the maintenance of 
the same my confession. And if my death can procure any quietness 
unto the church of God, and unto the State of my Prince and her kingdom 
wherein I was born, glad I am that I had a life to bestow in this service." 
When he was dead, an admirer of the system he opposed was inspired 
to break into these doggerel lines : — 

" The Welshman is hanged, 

Who at our kirk flanged, 

And at her state banged. 

And burned are his books. 

And though he be hanged ; 

Yet he is not wranged. 

The devil has him fanged, 

In his crooked kluks." 



THEIR NOTION OF A GATHERED CHURCH 221 

together in order to worship God in Christ was a church. 
They beheved that every church was gathered out of a 
mixed society and organized itself according to the princi- 
ples of Christ, pervaded by His spirit, living entirely for His 
ends. They believed that the kingdom of God was to come, 

§ (a) Francis Johnson, who was the brother of George Johnson, married 
a wife who was the cause of a great deal of trouble to himself and to the 
church at Amsterdam. He was pastor of it, the man who presided over 
all its functions of worship, and was responsible to the people as a people 
of God for what he did and said. 

{j3) Henry Ainsworth is said to have been a Lancashire man, born 
near Blackburn, and educated in the school there. He was teacher 
in the church at Amsterdam over which Francis Johnson presided. Ains- 
worth was at once teacher of dogma and history, in Hebrew and in Greek, 
in the exposition of the Old and of the New Testament. He differed 
with Johnson on three occasions, the last of which was final and fatal 
to Johnson, who therefore may be said to have been less wise than Ains- 
worth, who had a subject which lent itself more to popular notions, with- 
out in any degree being less personal to men than the affairs of the time. 

(7) John Robinson is the famous Pilgrim pastor. He is known as 
Robinson of Leyden, partly because he went from England to Leyden 
and settled there, and hence the men of the Mayflower sailed from 
Delft Haven. He is known as a semi-separatist, i.e. as a person who 
agreed with the Puritans as to the corruption of the time, but who 
differed from his own friends as to the church being the main cause 
of the corruptions. So far, then, he may seem less vigorous and less 
modern than Barrowe and Greenwood ; but he had the spirit native 
to the Congregational churches of New England. In this respect two 
things are significant : (i) his saying that God had more light to break 
out of His Holy Word, which signified that while they knew and had 
attained some knowledge, yet they did not know and had not attained 
to its fulness ; (ii) he also said that while they had gone to New England 
to spread the kingdom of Christ and the kingdom of England at the same 
time, they had far better and more wisely have proceeded in the way of 
converting one Indian before killing many. 

(5) Henry Jacob was the pastor of the first Congregational Church in 
England, the church, too, that created the word " independent " as an 
English word. Jacob had gone to Leyden and conferred with Robinson, 
who may, therefore, be regarded as the head not only of Congregationalism 
in America, but of Independency in England. 

One of the informers in the pay of the Government testifies of the 
Independents that, "in all their meetings they teach that there is no 
Head or Supreme Governor of the church of God but Christ, and that 
the magistrate hath no authority to appoint ministers in the church, 



222 INDEPENDENT AND ANGLICAN IDEALS; THE ANGLICAN 

not by the action of the magistrate or the poUtical inclusion 
of whole parishes ; but by the pure preaching of the Word 
and the godly living of the faithful. They believed that 
societies so created and constituted were independent; 
only as they were so could they obey the conscience God 
illumined, or build up a society after the ideal of Christ; 
and so over them in matters religious neither bishop nor 
presbytery nor magistrate could have any authority to 
exercise coercion or control. 

3. Now it would be interesting to compare this indepen- 
dent polity, even in its first crude conception, with the Angli- 
can and Genevan polities. Here, for example, is Hooker's 
fine statement of his idea : 

" We hold that, seeing there is not any man of the Church of 
England but the same man is also a member of the Common- 
wealth, nor any member of the Commonwealth which is not 
also of the Church of England, therefore as in a figure triangle 
the base doth differ from the sides thereof, and yet one and the 
selfsame line is both a base and also a side, a side simply, a 
base if it chance to be the bottom and underlie the rest: so, 
albeit proportions and actions of one do cause the name of a 
Commonwealth, qualities and functions of another sort the name 
of the Church, to be given to a multitude, yet one and the self- 



nor to set down any government for the church which is not directly 
commanded in God's Word." In an early confession there is given 
not simply a definition of the catholic or universal church, but of the 
local, the church to which Christ's promises were made; and as all 
men who belonged to this church were Christian, it was held to 
combine with the idea the promises of the Lord to His people as well. 
The church catholic is thus defined : " This church as it is univer- 
sally understood, containeth in it all the elect of God that have been, 
are, or shall be." The church local is again defined as "consisting 
of a company and fellowship of faithful and holy people gathered in the 
name of Christ Jesus, their only King, Priest, and Prophet, worshipping 
him aright, being peaceably and quietly governed by his officers and laws, 
keeping the unity of faith in the bond of peace and love unfeigned." 



AS EMBODIED IN HOOKER'S ECCLESIASTICAL POLITY 223 

same multitude may in such sort be both, and is so with us, 
that no person appertaining to the one can be denied also of 
the other."* 

How comprehensive and large-minded this seems ! What 
a splendid idea of a church — immense, complex, varied, 
rich with a nation's resources, and strong in the strength 
of its massive and masterly genius, especially when placed 
alongside the mean and ignoble ''company of believers," 
or ''covenanted society of the faithful," which was all the 
despised Brownists had to offer in its place! But fill out 
the two ideas, and then let us see which is the sublimer. 
Were the Church but a State, were it laden with no universal 
and eternal truths richer and diviner than the thoughts 
of any people; did it bear no transcendental ideas and 
ambitions of a range so infinite as to shame into insignifi- 
cance the aims and aspirations of the most exalted nations ; 
did it care no more for character than the State cares; 
were its honours reserved for capacity and favour rather 
than saintliness — then Hooker's idea might be as noble as 
the Congregational ideal seems poor and mean . Here, then, 
we have four things: (i) The significance of historical 
continuity, which is the continuous history of a people, 
(ii) The completeness of the abolition of the distinction 
between church and State, (iii) The abolition is so com- 
plete that it refers to every citizen who becomes de facto et 
dejuredi "member of the church of England." (iv) The 
difference between the two is purely one of nomenclature. 
The entity called the State may differ from the entity 
called the church, but the difference is as that between 
a base and a side in a triangle; each is simply "a self- 
same line." 

* Ecclesiastical Polity, vol. ii, p. 382. (Ed. 1825.) Bk. viii, ch. i, § 2. 
(Ed. 1888.) 



224 hooker's identification of state and church. 

But the church of England is infinitely more than even 
the Commonwealth of England. To Hooker the English 
church was but a political system, like the Commonwealth 
of England, into which the English race had been formed 
or organized. But Hooker, like the schoolman he was, 
answering his own question, "By what accident a society 
is termed a church? " says, '' When we oppose the church 
and the Commonwealth in the Christian society, we mean 
by the Commonwealth that society with relation to all the 
public affairs thereof, only the matter of true religion ex- 
cepted ; by the church the same society, with only reference 
to the matter of true religion." And so he adds, "We 
name a society a Commonwealth in regard of some 
regiment or policy under which men live; a church 
for the truth of that religion which they profess."* 
But the fundamental points in his distinction he forgot in 
his discussion. To profess ''the truth of a religion" is a 
personal act, which must be voluntarily and consciously 
done to be done at all; but this was precisely what 
could not happen or be allowed to happen in Hooker's 
theory of the identity of church and State. To him "one 
society is both the Church and Commonwealth," f and, as 
a necessary result, "our Church hath dependence from the 
chief in our Commonwealth." But this was to transform 
the profession of religion into a matter of loyalty, and to 
identify Nonconformity with rebellion. Responsibility to 
the king supplanted responsibility to God, godliness became 
a species of political obedience, and the church was emptied 
of its transcendental and ethical ideals that it might be 
organized into a system which was all the more civil that 
it was so intensely sacerdotal. 

* Ibid., p. 386. t Ibid., p. 389. 



THE CONGREGATIONAL IDEAL AND THE ANGLICAN 225 

But now let us turn to the idea that looks so mean beside 
Hooker's majestic conception. The Congregationalists said, 
A church is " a company of believers, " a ' ' covenanted society 
of the godly." But what did this signify? Did it not 
articulate a conception of God, of His methods and ends, 
of the dignity of man, of an unrealized but realizable 
spiritual order, far sublimer than was expressed in Hooker's 
ecclesiastical ideal? The systems must be judged not by 
their immediate and sensible attributes, but by their in- 
herent principles, essential tendencies, and ultimate results. 
The Anglican emphasized the idea of the church, its unity, 
authority, order; but the Congregationalist emphasized the 
idea of religion, the personal relation of God to the soul and 
the soul to God, aimed at making it feel in every moment and 
for every act directly responsible to Him ; embosomed in 
the infinite, a child of the eternal, able to use all sensuous 
things, even such as were sacred, as means of discipline or 
instruments of godliness, but never as necessities for the 
spirit. The Anglican dwelt fondly on the notion of political 
uniformity and a political obedience, a uniform law in 
church as in State, with its graded orders and regulated 
ministries, each created and sanctioned by acts political 
while ecclesiastical; but the Congregationalist loved the 
dream of spiritual unity and moral obedience, held enforced 
uniformity to be the mother of hypocrisy and all unrealities, 
fiercely hated the ecclesiastical conformity that too often 
allowed, and even rewarded, a faith without godliness, 
strenuously disbelieved in the sanctity of sensuous forms in 
religion, and orders created or dignities conferred by ordina- 
tion, and as strenuously believed in the sanctity of saintliness 
and the priesthood of universal Christian man. The Angli- 
can made obedience to the church a question for the magis- 
trate, bound the sovereign and the church in relations that 

Q 



226 THE APPARENTLY MEANER, THE MORE MAJESTIC 

placed the sovereign above its discipline and placed the 
church under his authority ; but the Congregationalist made 
obedience to God the distinctive characteristic of the re- 
ligious, the church independent of the magistrate, the sov- 
ereign able to exercise no authority over it, with no stand- 
ing in it as a prince, only as a man, as such amenable to it 
for his conduct, liable, like other men, to censure for ungod- 
liness, or to honour if he did well. The ideals were oppo- 
sites, but Congregationalism had throughout incomparably 
the nobler, where understood, appealing most mightily at 
once to the conscience and imagination of man. It seized 
with unexampled force the ethical significance of religion, 
bound godliness to faith, and made conformity to the 
Divine will the supreme condition of continuance in the 
church. It held in the loftiest scorn the systems that magni- 
fied office, that revered dignities rather than character, that 
enforced church discipline as if it were a matter of civil law, 
and was more jealous of the order of the magistrate than 
the honour of God. And with all the blended energy and 
patience of large conviction, Congregationalism laboured in 
obscurity and amid reproach to make religion the concern of 
the religious, to persuade the godly to live unto God and for 
man, to form themselves into brotherhoods, to live in amity 
towards each other, in fidelity to the State, and in righteous- 
ness towards all men. And Congregationalists so believed 
as to live in the hope that thus the kingdom of God would 
most surely come, and His will be done on earth as it is in 
heaven. 

Ill 

But now how did this Congregational polity, especially 
when it became Independent, affect the religion of Christ 
and the attempt at its realization? In order to answer 



THE CONGREGATIONAL NOT A SACERDOTAL THEORY 227 

this question we must exhibit the poHty, not only in itself, 
but also as it interpreted and represented religion alike 
to man and society, or to the individual and the State. 
Our space permits us to notice only a few salient points. 

I . The first thing to be noticed is this, the polity was the 
complete negation of what we have called sacerdotalism, 
with its political and religious bases. It signified the 
affirmation that religion was altogether spiritual, and 
real only as it was realized in the spirit and in the 
truth.* The priesthood of all believers is the only priest- 
hood Independency knows ; t its only sacrifices are those of 
spiritual service. J It will allow no official person to stand 
between the soul and God ; they two must meet each other 
face to face. The man who leads it is the teacher and 
preacher, not the priest but the prophet, able to exercise his 
office only by right of a Divine vocation, with no right to 
it unless the call be manifestly of God. His function is 
so to speak the truth in love as to speak it in power, so 
to preach as to save souls, so to teach as to enlighten and 
sanctify saints. Faith is the first thing demanded from every 
man; on personal conviction alone can a real religious 
experience be built. Doctrine is thus restored to its right- 
ful place, and made the vital centre of the whole system. 
The religion of Christ lived at first not as a political organi- 
zation, but by the truths that persuaded the intellect and 
commanded the conscience. It created a new life because 
it gave new convictions ; it renewed the man by the renewal 
of his whole intellectual and spiritual world. And the 
distinctive note of Independency was its direct appeal to 
the conscience and reason, its presentation of religion as 

* John iv. 23-24. 

t I Peter ii. 5-9; Rev. i. 6; v. 10; xx. 6. 

$ Rom. xii. i ; Phil. iv. 18. 



228 THE PERSONAL IDEAL ETHICAL AND INTELLECTUAL. 

the truth or series of truths that should reconcile man 
with God and with His order, and enable him to live in 
obedience to the eternal law of righteousness. The first 
and supreme thing was this reconciliation with God. Man 
could never be right in his human relations so long as he 
was wrong in his Divine. He could never hold his proper 
place in society, or fulfil his highest duties, until he lived 
in harmony with the order God had instituted . The passion 
for the church as a political organization was to Indepen- 
dency a mean ambition ; its passion was for the kingdom of 
God and for the souls of men, for the obedience worked 
through faith in the truth and realized in righteousness. 

Hence its personal ideals in religion were ethical as well 
as intellectual. It believed in the ethics of Jesus, in His 
sermon on the mount as an obligatory law, designed for 
obedience and capable of being obeyed ; it loved His light, 
struggled after His sweetness, and endeavoured to find and 
walk in the way of His truth. It believed in the apostolic 
politics, held the brotherhood of believers to be a fact that 
ought to lie at the basis and regulate the relations and 
actions of all the living units built into the society called a 
church. It thought that the saintliest must also be the 
sanest man, the most reasonable and honourable ; it trusted 
in the pfomise of an indwelling Spirit, possessed by each, 
distributed through all, making even the lowliest company 
of the godly a goodly "fellowship of saints." And the 
Independents loved even unto death the polity which 
enabled them to live and struggle for their ideal ; for with- 
out it they did not see how their religion could ever be the 
religion of Christ. 

2. But a no less important point was the way in which 
Independency interpreted and represented religion to Society 
and the State. It may be said to have introduced a new 



EMPHASIZES RELIGION MORE, THE CHURCH LESS 229 

conception of the relation of religion to the magistrate. 
Religion, I say, which it emphasized, not the church, which 
it did not. It was a denial of the magistrate's authority 
over religion, combined with an assertion of its authority 
over him. These stood indissolubly together, and were but 
the negative and positive aspects of the same idea. 
Religion was too divine a thing to be used by any 
mere political person for political purposes, to be ordered 
and administered in the methods and for the ends of the 
mere statesman. God was an authority so absolute and 
universal as to require equal obedience in all persons and 
estates ; He was incapable of accepting any homage other 
than godliness. Over against the Anglican idea of con- 
formity to a mere ecclesiastical institution. Independency 
placed the idea of conformity to the will of Deity, with all 
that it implied as to the supremacy of conscience, the sacred- 
ness of personal convictions, the right of the individual 
reason or judgment, which involved the inviolable sanctity 
of the region where God ruled and man obeyed. This 
was an idea that made religion a new force in the State. 
It was equal to its political enfranchisement; for religion 
had hitherto been, as it were, imprisoned in a body 
politic. By Catholicism it had been identified with 
the papal system, and the often immoral will of the 
church had been enforced on men and States as the will 
of God. By Anglicanism it had been incorporated in a 
State church which made spiritual too nearly the equivalent 
of civil obedience, and which too much respected or depended 
on the sovereign to be able to assert the supreme right and 
authority of religion. But with Independency no polity in 
the State was able to command conscience or coerce reason. 
Religion could not become an organized political unity 
without ceasing to be religious. Corporate action was so 



230 

impossible to it that it escaped a temptation which Free 
churches have often found fatal, that they be permitted to 
legislate for a State that they would not allow to legislate 
for them. 

The religious strength of Independency was, therefore, its 
weakness as a denomination. 1 1 had no ecclesiastical ambi- 
tions ; its ambitions were all religious. In its churches, god- 
liness was the great thing ; its creation and development their 
supreme duty. Men who believed were bound to be good ; 
good men were the salt of the earth, and needful to its 
weal. Happiness was possible only as holiness was 
realized; and as to the pure all things were pure, so 
the righteous man must be righteous in everything, a 
saint while a citizen, a citizen while a saint. And so 
Independency forced to the front the idea that the 
convinced, pious. God-fearing man was the best citizen; 
that his duty was to make the State as religious as 
himself, which it could be, not by enforced conformity, 
but by becoming just in its laws, upright in its judgments, 
righteous in its conduct at home and abroad. As its church 
was a society of saints, its State ideal was a nation of 
righteous men living and acting righteously. It did not 
believe in either legislative or military machinery, but in 
men. Cromwell's model army, composed of men of spirit, 
convinced, devout men, who fought as unto God, expressed 
the mind of Independency, for it pursued its method. Its 
strong and true belief, sublime as true, was : — Create right- 
eous citizens, and the State will realize righteousness ; and 
with less than righteousness everywhere Independency could 
not be satisfied. For as Milton, its great poet and prophet, 
has fitly said , " A Commonwealth ought to be but as one huge 
Christian personage, one mighty growth and stature of an 
honest man, as big and compact in virtue as in body; for 



STRONG AS INTERPRETATION OF A RELIGION 23 1 

look, what the grounds and causes are of single happiness to 
one man, the same ye shall find them to a whole State."* 
The whole life, public and private, penetrated and regulated 
by religion unto righteousness is the Independent ideal. 
3. But this interpretation of the relation of religion to 
the State has, as we have said, its necessary counterpart in 
another interpretation of the relation in which the State 
ought to stand to religion. The obligation to godliness for 
the nation and individual alike was not the only thing Inde- 
pendency emphasized ; it emphasized no less the immediacy 
and inviolable sanctity of the relations in which religion and 
conscience stand, and ought to be allowed to stand, to each 
other. While it affirmed the lordship of the conscience 
over the magistrate, it denied the lordship of the magis- 
trate over the conscience ; and so, by placing religion, not 
as organized polity, but as the authoritative and normative 
principle of life, over the State, it refused to the State the 
right either to institute or regulate, to alter or to control the 
religion. Christianity thus had a fair chance to penetrate 
the English State with its own ideas. Lecky | has indeed 
argued that toleration is the child of scepticism, possible 
only in an age when men have grown conscious of 
the difficulties that beset belief. But here he errs. 
Toleration is not only possible, but necessary, the moment 
religion is made a matter for the conscience rather 

* Of Reformation in England, book ii, p. 11. Works. (Ed. 1834.) 
The main thesis which Milton discussed is: "That the church govern- 
ment must be conformable to the civil polity" — or that ecclesiastical 
and civil polity must agree — and " that no church - government is 
agreeable to monarchy, but that of bishops." It was an attempt that 
we are even to-day familiar with to read episcopacy out of royalty, 
though Milton himself had deprecated the very wish to " separate and 
distinguish the end and good of a monarch from the end and good of the 
monarchy, or of that from Christianity." 

f History of Rationalism in Europe, vol. ii, p. 56 ff. (5th ed.) 



232 THE FATHERS BEFORE CONSTANTINE. A CONVERTED 

than the magistrate; but it is impossible the moment 
it becomes an affair of the magistrate rather than the 
conscience. The period of most victorious certainty in the 
Christian church was also the period when it most stren- 
uously pleaded for religious freedom. The Fathers before 
Constantine * understood that men compelled to embrace a 
religion were only coerced into hypocrisy, and they re- 
proved the persecutions of Rome by affirming the suprem- 
acy of the conscience. So Tertullian argued f that to take 
away religious liberty and forbid free choice of worship was 
to promote impiety, for no man, much less a god, would 
care for a compulsory, which could only be a hateful because 
a hated homage. And again, he maintains J that it is a 
common human right and prerogative of nature that every 
man should worship God according to his own convictions; 
that it is no religious thing to compel to religion, which must 
be spontaneously embraced to be embraced at all. And the 
older faith had in the hour of fatal transition its witnesses 

* I am quite prepared to plead that we owe much to the first Christian 
emperor, but the fact of our deep obligation to him ought not to blind 
us to the further fact that, by introducing a pure Roman idea where a 
Hebrew would have been more in place, he did both religion and the 
church the utmost possible disservice. He was a converted man, but we 
may not say that either the emperor or his empire was converted. Hence 
the old notions of the inter-relations between religion and State were 
brought into Christianity. These old notions were quite unsuitable to 
Christianity ; and were so largely because religion was to Rome a matter of 
legislation and not simply of nature. The citizens were of the same reli- 
gion as Romans, not as men ; it was an affair of nation, not of manhood. 

•j- Apologeticus, c. 24. He says: "Adimere libertatem religionis et 
interdicere optionem divinitatis ut non liceat mihi colere quem velim, 
sed cogar colere quem nolim. Nemo se ab invito coli volet, ne homo 
quidem." And after enumerating the various goddesses of the provinces 
and cities, he complains, ironically, that they are allowed no choice : 
" Sed nos soli arcemur a religionis proprietate." And he concludes : " Bene 
quod omnium Deus est; cuius velimus aut nolimus omnes sumus." 

:J: Ad Scapulam, c. 2. Hence he says: "Sed nee religionis est cogere 
religionem quae sponte suscipi debeat, non vi." 



EMPEROR DOES NOT MEAN A CONVERTED EMPIRE 233 

in the noblest, who was also the most strenuous, of the 
then Fathers. So Athanasius says:* **It is proof that 
men have no confidence in their own faith when they use 
force and compel unwilling men to think as they do. It 
is the devil's method, because there is no truth in him, to 
work with hatchet and sword." And Hilary of Poitiers 
lamented f the degeneracy of the days when the Divine 
faith was recommended by an appeal to an earthly name ; 
and the name of Christ made to seek the protection of a 
crowned head, as if He Himself had become impotent 
and helpless. Finely he told Constantius : J ''You govern 
that all may enjoy sweet liberty; only by permitting each 
to live wholly according to his own convictions can peace 
be restored to the Church." ''God is the Lord of the 
universe, and requires not an obedience which is forced " ; 
and he even charged § the emperor with burdening the 
altar of God with the gold of the State. And Lactantius, 1 1 
in a noble and eloquent passage, argued that only reason, 
never compulsion, availed in religion, which could be de- 
fended not by slaying, but by dying ; not by wasting, but by 
suffering ; not by inj ustice, but by fidelity. Nothing was so 
much a matter of free choice as religion: where the heart 
does not love to serve, there it is not. 



IV 

I. Now the Fathers who so argued believed religion to 
be spiritual ; what they argued against was its materializa- 

* Hist. Arian., § 39. 

f Contra AHanos, ii, 594. (Ed. Veron., 1730.) 
X Ad Constant, lib. i, 535, c. i. 

§ Vel Aucentium. See in Migne, c. 5, on the church as not founded 
with human help. Ad Const. Proper., i, 10. ^ 

11 Instit. Div., v, 20. 



234 THE FATHERS BELIEVE RELIGION TO BE SPIRITUAL; 

tion by the power over it being transferred from the spirits 
where it Uved and reigned to the imperial cabinet, where 
intrigue held sway and Christians became churchmen who 
lost in the game of politics the simplicity of their early 
faith and character. An imperial policy disguised in eccle- 
siastical terms and forms can never be tolerant; a spirit 
devoted to godliness, hating as radically evil and futile all 
ungodly methods and means for promoting godliness, can 
never be intolerant. Constantine did more against the new 
religion than was done by the misappropriation four or five 
centuries after he had lived of his name for a forged dona- 
tion, which even Dante regretted ; he restored the relation 
of religion to the State which had been realized under his 
predecessors. The persecutions under the Stuarts were no 
better and no worse than those under the emperors; and 
both were justified by the same reasons of State and policy. 
If religion be civil, and if all the people in a given area 
should be of the same faith and should worship the same gods 
in the same way as the legislative and administrative power 
of the State — then they were bound to cut off every head 
that thought otherwise than themselves. Independency, 
as an endeavour to realize the most ancient and least political 
Christianity, broke with the coercive policy which the 
political incorporation of the church in the State had 
made inevitable. The first English Congregationalist de- 
clared like Tertullian that ' ' to compel religion, to plant 
churches by power, and to force submission to ecclesiastical 
government by laws and penalties, belonged not" to the 
magistrate. He said, in language that recalled Athan- 
asius, that the Lord's people were "of the willing sort," 
driven by "conscience and not the power of man." And 
so he held that magistrates had as such "no authority 
over the Church," but "only to rule the commonwealth 



WHICH FAITH HISTORICAL INDEPENDENCY SHARES 235 

in all outward justice.""^ And these principles, as funda- 
mental to Independency, found in its earliest literature 
more or less complete expression. Barrowe and Greenwood 
maintained that ' ' Christ was the only head of His Church " ; 
that ''His laws no man may alter" ; that while it was ''the 
duty of the prince to inquire out and renew the laws of 
God," yet in matters of religion conscience must be obeyed, 
"though all the princes of the world should prohibit the 
same upon pain of death." f 

John Robinson argued that "civil causes" could never 
"bring forth spiritual effects," and that " compulsive laws " 
might create hypocrisy, but never the spirit that ' ' received 
the word gladly." J Henry Jacob, when he returned from 
Holland to found the Church at Southwark, pleaded with 
King James for toleration, prayed that pious tender con- 
sciences might be left free to serve God in their own way. 
In his very notion of the Church the principle was contained 
which had been so well and boldly stated a year or so 
before by the Anglo-Dutch Baptists: "The magistrate is 
not to meddle with religion, or matters of conscience, nor 
to compel men to this or that form of religion, because 
Christ is the King and Lawgiver of the church and con- 
science." 

2. Of all the religious ideas which were native to Inde- 
pendency, no one has so penetrated English thought or 

* Robert Browne. Treatise of Reformation without Tarying for Anie, 
pp. 10, II, 12, 15. We do not wonder that Dr. Dexter in his Congre- 
gationalism of the Last Three Hundred Years, should claim for "the 
Founders " of Congregational Independency — by which he means Robert 
Browne — to be as he says the first writer in the English tongue to state 
" the true and the modern notion of the relation of the magistrate to the 
church, and so to formulate a "true doctrine of toleration," pp. 103, 
■697-708. 

f See Barrowe's Brief Discoverie of the False Church, also his Collection 
of certaine Sclanderous Articles, and Greenwood's Answer to George Gifford. 

X Works, ii, 488. 



236 TOLERATION IN ENGLAND; ITS REPRESENTATIVES; 

SO moulded English polity as toleration. Its history in 
England has still to be written. It does not fall within 
our province to trace even its main outlines. One thing is 
certain, whatever may have been the dream — so sadly con- 
tradicted by his practice — of Sir Thomas More, it was as an 
actual and realizable ideal the creation of Independency. 
The two branches into which it so soon divided, the Congre- 
gational and Baptist, may have at first differed as regards 
the statement and application of the principle ; but on this 
point there is no doubt that " a whole generation before the 
Treatise" either of Busher on Religious Peace or Murton 
on Persecution Robert Browne in formulating the congrcT 
gational theory formulated also the modern doctrine of 
"liberty of conscience."* The church of Helwys may 
have been more thorough -going than the church of Jacob, 
just as the tracts of Busher and Murton while more logical 
may also have been more unqualified in their notion and 
doctrine of religious liberty than were the expositions of 
the scholarly and scholastic Ainsworth, or the discussions 
of the sober and large-minded Robinson. Hanserd KnoUys 
and Roger Williams may have held and suffered for a 
toleration more comprehensive than was desired by Philip 
Nye or William Bridge. Many things may help to explain 
the difference. The Baptists learned much from their 
Dutch friends, both Arminian and Mennonite; while the 
Dutch theological affinities and relationships of the Congre- 
gationalists tended altogether in an opposite direction. But 
these are points that do not concern us : this alone does — 
the toleration, qualified or unqualified, was in each case 
based on the new ideal of religion and the church. The 
new ideal of religion proclaimed the rights of the individ- 
ual conscience; the new idea of the church its duties and 

* Dr. Dexter's Congregationalism, &c., p. 103. 



TOLERATION A CREATION OF INDEPENDENCY 237 

obligations. The main matter was no longer uniformity, 
but reality — not the organization of religious forms, but 
the conversion of the soul and the regulation of the life by 
truths directly believed and completely obeyed. 

And the significant matter is that, save on this ground, 
toleration can never be, and has never been, logically 
claimed and defended by a man beHeving religion to be 
true. In the history of liberal and literary religious 
thought in England, no four names are more honoured 
and more worthy of honour than those of Francis Bacon, 
William Chillingworth, Jeremy Taylor, and John Locke; 
and each is an illustrious proof of our thesis. Bacon's 
position is stated in two places: the essay on ''Religion," 
first pubHshed in 1599, when the question was still hotly 
discussed; the second in the essay on ''Unity in 
Religion," published in 1625. Each contains the familiar 
line from Lucretius, 

"Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum," 

and explains its occasion. The true God is jealous — 
though no attempt is made to explain what jealousy 
means — and men must observe the bounds of unity. 
The Hne of Lucretius is introduced as an illustration of 
religion using the temporal sword ; but if he had seen the 
St. Bartholomew massacres in France and the gunpowder 
plot in England, he would "have been seven times the 
epicure and atheist he was." Bacon may be said to 
deprecate any act which turns the church "into a work 
of pirates and assassins." Chillingworth's great service was 
to oppose to the idea of the church and its authority the 
idea that " the Bible, and the Bible only, is the religion of 
Protestants. ' ' And this religion is one that authority cannot 
interpret, only " right reason" can; interpretation must be 



238 TAYLOR'S "liberty OF PROPHESYING"; AND LOCKE'S 

by the conscience for the conscience.* Taylor's great argu- 
ment for freedom, as he calls it — or '* Liberty of Prophe- 
sying" — is based on the nature of faith, and toleration is 
made dutiful because faith is rational ; it lives by persuasion, 
not by polities. His work convinces in the degree that it 
limits the authority of the church and affirms the rights 
of the reason. The church, he says, ■* has power to intend 
our faith, but not to extend it, to make our belief more 
evident, but not more large and comprehensive." She has 
no power to declare any article * ' necessary which before 
was not necessary. By so doing she makes the narrow 
way to be even narrower, and chalks out one more path 
to the devil than he had before."! Locke's plea for 
toleration which started from a conception of the church he 
owed to Independency, was cogent in the very degree in 
which it logically developed and applied the conception. 
Take away the ideas of the essential voluntariness of 
religion and the religious society, and the very basis is 
taken away from Locke's argument.J 

Independency, then, prevailed over its enemies. The 
whole movement towards religious liberty has been a move- 

* Works, ii, 170, 404, 411, but see pars. $8, 39. (Oxford Ed.) 

f Liberty of Prophesying, Sec. i, cc. 12, 13. 

X See the opening of Locke's first letter on "Toleration." As he pro- 
ceeds he argues in a fashion all " Independents " agreed with and loved: 
"The care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate, because his 
power consists only in outward force ; but true and saving religion 
consists in the inward persuasion of the mind." {Works, 1769, ii. 225.) 
Locke besides this, which we may call his religious reason, had as well 
what may be termed his metaphysical or philosophical reason. What 
this is may be seen if we turn to his Human Understanding, Bk. iv, c. xvi, 
§4. Fraser says (ii, 374): "The section presents part of Locke's argu- 
ment." Fraser, in a note on p. 371, quotes Cudworth as saying that 
" truth and error are usually to be found on both sides of a great ques- 
tion"; and on 374 adds Glanvill's name to those of Chillingworth and 
Taylor as a "divine" who has "pleaded for toleration of inevitable 
differences of opinion." 



LETTERS EMBODIMENTS OF THE INDEPENDENT IDEAL 239 

merit towards the realization of its ideal. The moment 
Chillingworth forgot his notion of the Christian religion, 
and acted in behalf of the ecclesiastical polity he believed, 
his theory broke down. Taylor the bishop and ecclesiastic 
was a radical and embodied contradiction of Taylor the 
apologist for freedom. The independent idea is the only 
sure basis for a theory of toleration, and in practice its 
only complete realization. 



V 

I. Here our discussion leads us to the threshold of a 
great subject, which we cannot even glance at — the 
action of Independency on the State and people and 
religion of England. The principles it embodies have 
been progressively victorious principles, ever securing 
more recognition and authority in the State, and ever 
making it a roomier and healthier home for reasonable 
and religious spirits. By what seems an act almost 
of inspired foresight. Independency set about creat- 
ing the ideas, forming the societies, and realizing the 
conditions best fitted to make religion a living moral 
power in the State, and to make the State stand 
in its proper relation to religion. And Providence 
has crowned its history with a success that more than 
rewards its centuries of obscurity, civil disability, and 
ecclesiastical conflict. Its success is not a thing of 
statistics; figures can in no way represent it. It is 
embodied in the legislation, in the civil rights, in the 
religious liberties so slowly and so hardly won, in the 
political duties so strenuously fulfilled, in the public opinion 
and public conduct of the English people. Thanks mainly 
to Independency, the English people have learned that the 



240 ACTION OF INDEPENDENCY ON ENGLISH STATE. 

State inimical to religious freedom is the worst enemy of 
religion; that to tolerate only one church in the State 
is to identify the State with the church, and thus to do 
the utmost injury to the religion of Jesus Christ. Nor 
are these its only services. No student of English history 
can deny that it created a new conscience for conduct in 
the English people, new qualities of character and types 
of virtue, and added some of the most illustrious names to 
the long roll of Christian heroes and saints. But while 
creating a loftier and more ethical ideal of the Christian 
man, it also lifted the conception of the church of Jesus 
Christ; made the church less civil and more spiritual, less 
political and more social, less sacerdotal and more moral. It 
placed religion above the sovereign as above the man, made 
the church as a society independent of the State, but as the 
bearer of the ideals and truths, as the vehicle and exponent 
of the religion of Jesus Christ, related to the State as to 
the individual — related, that is, as the teacher and preacher 
of righteousness, with a commission which comes direct 
from the Eternal. 

2. The attitude of the Anglican church to the sovereign 
was an inexpressible humiliation to the man who under- 
stood and believed and loved the ideal of Independency. 
It was so by virtue of the varied infidelities it involved. 
It contradicted the fundamental principle of a return to 
the way and idea of Christ and His apostles. It offended 
the strong belief in the dignity, the spiritual kinghood 
and priesthood of every Christian man. It sinned against 
the profound conviction that a man who was a citizen 
in the kingdom of God, who held ofhce and exercised rule in 
His church, ought to be a godly man. It were almost impos- 
sible to enlighten the Anglican as to the feelings of the Inde- 
pendent who hears him maintain the most unhistorical thesis 



THE STATE A COMPOUND OF GOOD AND EVIL 241 

that an utter scapegrace like the second Charles, a cr\^pto- 
Catholic to boot, was by the grace of God king of England 
and the head of the English Church. It would have seemed 
to him too grotesque for impiety had it not been tog bitter 
for tears. Time never inflicted a more deserved revenge 
than when it forced the Anglican to see a king by his own 
divine right the head of his church, while a papist in 
profession and in deed. Yet it ought to have been a less 
humiliation than was the sight in the same position of 
his less honest and as unclean avowed papistic brother. 
But humiliations of that sort can be suffered by Angli- 
canism alone; they are impossible to Independency. 
Strong in the faith that Christ is king, that where He 
reigns no sovereign has any right or title to interfere, 
that the surest note of a Christian man is his being 
obedient to Christ in all things, and the surest note of the 
Christian church is its working in Christ's way for Christ's 
ends — the Independent lived through the old days of dark- 
ness into these days of light, and helped to make the day 
when it dawned as the day of rich fruition, and still richer 
promise we find it to be. 



&pa odv ovk4tl icrrk ^hoi Kal ir&poiKoi, dXX(£ iare avfiirdXTTai twv ayiuv kuI 
OLKeloL Tov QeoO, iiroLKoboixrjdhTes iirl t(^ deixeXlt^ rdv aTroaTdXup Kal TrpofprjTuiv, 
bvTos aKpoywviaiov avrov ^picrrod 'Irjaov, ev c^ irdaa oiKodo/tTj avvapfiokoyovfi^vrj af/^et 
its vabv ajLov ev Kvpiip, iv (^ Kal vfieTs crvvoLKodofMeicrde ds KaTOiKTjTi^piov rov QeoO iy 
Uvetj/mTi. — Enhesians ii. 19-22. 

ijyrjcrdfxrjv odv, el irapa^eO^eie tis 

XprjcTTcp irovrjpbv \iKTpov. ovk h.v edreKveTv, 

icrdXoLV d' aw' dficpoip iadXbv hv <pvvai ybvov. 

Eurip. , Frag/n., 524. 

t6 yap TTJs Tro\iTLKT]s T^Xos dpiffTov iridefjiev, aiirr] 8^ TrXelaTrjv iirifxiXeiav TTOtetrat 
ToO iroiovs TLvas Kal dyadovs rods TroXt'ras TroLrjaai Kal jrpaKTLKods tQv koKlov. 

Eth. Nic. I, 10, 1099, b. 29. 

XucrireXet ydp^ olixaL, tj/mv ij dWi^Xuiv diKatocruvr] Kal dper'f), 

Plato, Protagoras, § 46. 

Si suam potestatem ad Dei cultum maxime dilatandum majestati ejus 
famulam faciunt ; si Deum timent, diligunt, colunt ; si plus amant illud regnum, 
ubi non timent habere consortes. — Augustine, Le Civitate Del, lib. 5, cap. xxiv. 

Non esse petendum ab Imperatoribus, ut ipsam ha'eresim juberent omnino non 
esse, poenam constituendo eis qui in ilia esse voluissent : sed hoc potius con- 
stituerent, ut eorum furiosas violentias non paterentur qui veritatem catholicam 
vel praedicarent loquendo, vel legerent constituendo. — lb. Epistolce, 185, 25. 

Wo das Evangelium ist, da muss eine heilige christliche Kirche sein. — Kostlin, 
Luther s Theologie^ vol. ii, p. 535. 

Though God for less than ten just persons would not spare Sodom, yet if you 
can find, after due search, but only one good thing in prelaty, either to religion or 
civil government, to king or parliament, to prince or people, to law, liberty, 
wealth, or learning, spare her, let her live, let her spread among ye, till with her 
shadow all your dignities and honours, and all the glory of the land be darkened 
and obscured. But on the contrary, if she be found to be malignant, hostile, 
destructive to all these, as nothing can be surer, then let your severe and impartial 
doom imitate the divine vengeance ; rain down your punishing force upon this 
godless and oppressing government, and bring such a dead sea of subversion upon 
her, that she may never in this land rise more to afflict the holy reformed church 
and the elect people of God. — Milton (ed. 1834), The Reason of Church Govern,' 
ment, p. 54. 

If you require a further answer, it will not misbecome a Christian to be either 
more magnanimous or more devout than Scipio was ; who, instead of other 
answer to the frivolous accusations of Petilius the tribune, " This day, Romans," 
(saith he) " I fought with Hannibal prosperously; let us all go and thank the gods, 
that gave us so great a victory" : in like manner will we now say, not caring other- 
wise to answer this unprotestant-like objection : In this age, Britons, God hath 
reformed his church after many hundred years of popish corruption ; in this 
age he hath freed us from the intolerable yoke of prelates and papal discipline ; 
in this age he hath renewed our protestation against all those yet remaining 
dregs of superstition. — lb. Animadversions upon the Reiiionstranf s Defence. 
against Sfnectymnuus, p. 65. 



II 



'AiroKpidels S^ 'Zlixwv U^rpos etire, '* 2i) et 6 XpiCTOs, 6 vlbs rod QeoO rod 

Kal a-KOKpidels 6 ^Irjaous etirev avrip " Ma/cdp^os el, 'EifMuu Bapiujvd, 6'ti crap| Kai 
atfia ouK a.ir€Kd\v\p^ aoi dXX' 6 irarrjp jxov 6 iv rois ovpavois Kayu} 8^ (xoi X^yw, 6'ti 
ai> el n^rpos, Kal iirl ravT-Q rrj ir^rpq. olKodofirjao) fxov ttjv iKKK-qaLav, Kal iriiXai 
^8ov 01) Kariax^'covaiv avrrjs. — Matthew xvi. ly, 1 8. 

el 8i Tis 8oKeL (piXdveiKOS elvai, -rj/xeis T0iavT7]v avv-qdeiav ovk ^x^l^^^i oi)5^ at 
^KKXrfalai Tov Qeou. — I Corinthians xi. i6. 

Mundo evocatum vel collectum coetum fidelium, sanctorum inquam omnium 
communioneni, eorum videlicet, qui deum veterum in Christo servatore per 
verbum et super summum vere cogno?cunt et rite colunt, denique omnibus bonis 
per Christum gratuito oblatis fide participant. — Conlessio helvetica^ II. 17. 

Ecclesia militans est visibilis et invisibilis. — A. Diest. 

Ecclesia invisibihs credenda, visibilis colenda. — Alst, 545. 

Ecclesia est coetus electorum a deo e statu miseriae in statum gratiae efficaciter 
vocatorum et sub uno capite Christo collatorum. — Heikgger. 

Nee vero satis est electorum turbam cogitatione animoque complecti, nisi talem 
ecclesia? unitatem cogitemus, in quam nos esse insitos vere simus persuasi. Nisi 
enim sub capite nostro Christo coadunati simus reliquis omnibus membris, nulla 
nos manet spes haereditatis futurae. — Calvin, Institutio ChristiancB Religionis, 
Lib. 4, cap. i, 2. 

The teachers of the Church ought not to be dictators, or masters of men's 
faith, but helpers of men's faith ; for they are not to make religion, but to show it. 
They do not take away the key of knowledge from the people, as our Saviour 
chargeth the Pharisees, or as S. Austin saith, they do not command faith in men, 
upon peril of damnation, to show their superiority, or to practise as governors : 
but they do appear in the good office of discretion, and giving men counsel. 'Tis 
not pride of ruling and shewing power, but out of compassion to lead people into 
the way of truth, and to recover them out of error and mistake. — Whichcote, 
Discourses, vol. i, p. 273. 

For in point of natural religion (which takes in sobriety, righteousness, and 
piety) you may easily satisfy any man by reason. For no man is in any thing 
more certain, than that he ought to be sober and temperate ; than that he ought 
to deal righteously, and so as he would be dealt by ; and that he ought to carry 
himself equally and fairly ; and that he ought to fear and reverence the Deity : 
for these are the dictates of natural light. — lb., p 269. 

This is true Liberty, when freeborn men, 
Having to advise the public, may speak free. 
Which he who can, and will, deserves high praise ; 
Who neither can, nor will, may hold his peace ; 
W^hat can be juster in a state than this? 
Euripid., Hicetid., 437 ; Milton (ed. 1834), Areopagiiica, p. 103. 



But in true religion there is nothing which the reason of mankind can challenge 
or object against : nothing wherein the reason of mankind may not have so good 
an account, so as to have satisfaction. — Whichcote, Discourses, vol. i, p. 267. 

Religion is not so slight a thing as a naked profession, or a bare denomination. 
Glorious things are reported in scripture of religion. It hath deservedly a very 
great name in the world ; for see what effects religion doth attain ; through a 
man's religion, he is an habitation of God, through the Spirit ; a man is made a 
temple of the Holy Ghost, a man is made partaker of the divine nature, and his 
conversation is in Heaven. Wherefore, if we profess religion, let us do such things, 
by virtue of the spirit of religion, which others can neither do nor counterfeit. — 
lb., vol. ii, p. 440. 

By worldly wisdom we mean skill, knowledge, and dexterity in the mystery of 
arts and sciences ; either mental or intellectual, or manual and mechanical ; the 
skill of tongues and languages, and prudence in the administration of the affairs 
of this life. Now all these are truths and realities ; for they are gifts of God. 
And these men are well accomplished, and are all profitable instruments in the 
commonwealth, and fit to do service. God doth own these perfections in men, 
for God gives them. — Ib.,yo\. iv, p 297. 

How then should the dim taper of Constantine's age, that had such need of snuff- 
ing, extend any beam to our times, wherewith we might hope to be better lighted, 
than by those luminaries that God hath set up to shine to us far nearer hand? 
And what reformation he wrought for his own time it will not be amiss to con- 
sider ; he appointed certain times for fasts and feasts, built stately churches, gave 
large immunities to the clergy, great riches and promotions to bishops, gave and 
ministered occasion to bring in a deluge of ceremonies, thereby either to draw in 
the heathen by a resemblance of their rites, or to set a gloss up m the simplicity 
and plainness of Christianity; which, to the gorgeous solemnities of paganism, 
and the sense of the world's children, seemed but a homely and yeomanly religion ; 
for the beauty of inward sanctity was not within their prospect. — Milton (ed. 1834), 
Of Refor77iation in England, p. 7. 

Ah Constantine ! of how much ill was cause 
Not thy conversion, but those rich domains. 
That the first wealthy pope received of thee ! — lb. , p. 8. 

Then, amidst the hymns and hallelujahs of saints, some one may perhaps be 
heard offering at high strains in new and lofty measures, to sing and celebrate thy 
divine mercies and marvellous judgments in this land throughout all ages ; whereby 
this great and warlike nation, instructed and inured to the fervent and continual 
practice of truth and righteousness, and casting far from her the rags of her old 
vices, may press on hard to that high and happy emulation to be found the 
soberest, wisest, and most Christian people at that day, when thou, the eternal 
and shortly-expected King, shalt open the clouds to judge the several kingdoms of 
the world, and distributing national honours and rewards to religious and just 
commonwealths, shalt put an end to all earthly tyrannies, proclaiming thy 
universal and mild monarchy through heaven and earth.— /^., p. 21. 



INTRODUCTORY 

'T^HE discussions which have so far circled round our 
-^ main problem have been occupied with what may 
be termed the church in history. The idea is twofold: 
there is (a) the church, which is related to Christ as He to 
God ; it is His incarnation, speaks to His Eternal Presence, 
witnesses to His character, and is the immortal from which 
His beneficent activity has assumed. There is (/3) history, 
which is here conceived as the written and registered life 
of collective man, especially as expressed (i) in the thought 
which becomes either philosophy or doctrine, whether 
climbing to heaven, so as to stand face to face with God, or 
descending to earth, so as to interpret man in his history 
and read order into the phenomena of the world ; (ii) in the 
emotions and imagination which beget religion and produce 
art ; (iii) in the will which creates virtue and performs the 
duties belonging to a religion reckoned as Christ's ; and (iv) 
in the conscience which sees the dutiful, and either sanctions 
or upholds it. From these discussions we must now turn to 
the New Testament, and inquire what it meant by ''the 
Church" and ''its worship"; what by "the Christ" who 
made the church by making the men who composed it, and 
what these men did and thought when they built it, and 
made it, themselves, and their time the model for later 
days. There are therefore certain preliminary questions 
which must be considered before any one of our subjects 
can be intelligently discussed. 

245 



246 THE N. T. WRITERS INFERIOR TO THE MEN OF TO-DAY. 

I 

I. The lesson of history is eminently simple, yet it is one 
living men are ever in need of learning: we ought to 
be better judges of what is written in the New Testament 
than even those who wrote it, especially as the men who 
composed the writings did not, as a rule, know who were en- 
gaged in writing it, or the things written. Experience must, 
especially if racial, count for something. The apostles or 
their contemporaries, who saw the new religion born, testi- 
fied to what they saw, yet they neither saw nor knew every- 
thing. The foundation which they themselves laid may 
have seemed to them the whole ; yet it is not the whole to 
those who still live. Man has not changed, though time 
has, which has built a superstructure, here good, there 
bad; and in order to be judged the superstructure must 
be known. The history of Christianity is one thing now, 
and was another thing then. Our experience of the re- 
ligion is, while longer and larger, as valid as the apostolic. 

The Christian religion has had as much to do with the 
making of the atmosphere we breathe as Judaism or 
Hellenism, or the two combined, had to do with the 
formation of the atmosphere breathed by the apostles. 
And in their case, as in ours, atmosphere included litera- 
ture. Now we may interpret the literature through the 
history of the religion, and remember its historical achieve- 
ments, yet it would seem to us an act of incomparable 
impertinence to say: "The men who saw the mean 
beginnings of the religion are the best judges of its 
intrinsic truth," or "We have only to see what they saw 
as they saw it, to think as they thought, and to believe as 
they did." This may be equivalent to saying: "For us 
history has no meaning and experience no worth." Nor 



CAUSE OF THE INFERIORITY 247 

should we be any wiser were we to say: "We need not 
concern ourselves about the creative period, nor about the 
persons, ideas, and facts which constitute the reHgion; it 
is enough to be satisfied with its sweet counsels in life, its 
gracious promises in death, and the light it sheds upon 
what lies beyond the grave. ' ' To think thus were to imagine 
that religion is not the synonym of truth, and that its true 
and high function is rather to comfort the individual than 
to organize the race, or to discipline man for the pursuit of 
righteousness. 

Yet as our study must be critical to be penetrative, it is 
not our purpose to concede to any one the right to say: 
"To interrogate is to discredit the witnesses, to analyze 
their words is to doubt their veracity, to look at the 
persons whose history they write, or at the events whose 
occurrence they attest, in the calm light of reason, is to 
lower their majesty and insult their truth." For this 
implies that research is vanity and knowledge is sin ; that 
to believe the false is nobler than to trust the true; and 
that there is more of God in the ignorance which does not 
reason than in the thought which thirsts to know. And 
these are things we do not believe. For the New Testament 
is to us on the lowest ground not the mere book of a religion, 
the recorded testimonies of the men who saw the religion 
born. As such, indeed, its veracity could be so established as 
to be indubitable ; but Scripture has a signification beyond 
history, for it is simply a chapter in the life of God which 
He Himself has caused to be written ; and its character is 
more than a personal vindication; it is an assertion of 
"Eternal Providence." 

2. Our work may thus be defined as, in the broadest 
sense interpretative ; but we have still something to say 
about the book we would interpret. What man has written 



248 THE DIFFERENT CLASSES IN CRITICISM 

he can investigate. The only investigation which counts 
must be based upon knowledge, which may be best repre- 
sented as the method which mind follows when it seeks 
by some act of interpretation to discover truth. Now, 
interpretation so conceived is at once an art, an action, and 
a process. As an art it separates the true from the 
false, and can be learned ; as an action it is the intelligent 
use of the art, to read and find out the truth embodied in 
literature, or the conduct, the character, and the institu- 
tions it describes; as a process it is the action viewed as 
continuous, the continuity being due to the constant applica- 
tion of a knowledge in which there is no impiety to literature. 
So conceived, interpretation cannot be forbidden. There 
is no literature, however sacred, which forbids it. The sanc- 
tity, which would depreciate the Creator in the man He had 
created, would be curiously akin to profanity. Were a 
revelation fenced off from rational investigation, greater 
divinity would be claimed for the book than either for 
the God who speaks in it and of whom it speaks, or the 
religion whose founding it narrates and whose founders it 
describes. For God and religion alike live in mind just as 
mind feels free to think of both, and to criticize them ; the 
fascination of the two for reason consists in their ability to 
play upon it, to set it the problems the reason feels it must 
solve or die. We do not here assume that a religion proves 
its divinity by answering every possible question reason can 
ask. Reason satisfied would be man dissatisfied, for his 
education would be ended, his progress arrested, and all 
hopefulness taken out of the race by its doubts being re- 
moved. Hence those who in the supposed interests of 
religion speak disdainfully of knowledge are in reality 
irreligious, and sin equally against man and God. They 
say, in effect : '' Religion is but a form of law which custom 



NEED NOT BE IMPIOUS 249 

has sanctioned, and which lives not as truth or duty, but 
as law; its ideal has no place for knowledge, but simply 
for the authority that corrects rather than constrains." 



II 

I. Knowledge, then, has its function alike in the Chris- 
tian religion and in its literature. And what is knowledge 
as applied to letters save criticism? And criticism, as here 
conceived, falls into four classes: (a) Literary, (^) his- 
torical, (7) religious, and (^) doctrinal, (a) Literary criti- 
cism is of two kinds, textual and documentary; the first, 
which is known as the lower criticism, concerns the purity 
or impurity of the text, or the record as written ; the second, 
which is named the higher criticism, concerns the date, the 
sequence, the authenticity, and the authorship of the 
writings themselves, (fi) Historical criticism discusses 
events and persons, with the view of determining their order 
and reality, their kind and quality, whether they are tran- 
scendental or empirical, supernatural or natural. The 
ideas which literary criticism tests and interprets, historical 
criticism applies and illustrates, using the books as lamps 
for the illumination of the moment or the movement it 
would understand. Baur* justly complained that what 
Strauss gave was a criticism of the Gospel history without 
any criticism of the Gospels as literature; and he argued 
that historical criticism must be based on literary ; that till 
we knew when, why, and by whom the Gospels were written 
it was impossible to speak sensible or trustworthy words 
concerning the history narrated. Without the criticism of 
literature there could be neither order nor accuracy in our 
knowledge of history; without historical criticism there 

* Untersuchungen ueber die can, Ev. (1847), P- 4°- 



250 CRITICISM, LITERARY, HISTORICAL, AND RELIGIOUS. 

would be nothing to keep thought face to face with reality. 
The two criticisms are thus inseparably connected: the 
criticism which does not shed light upon a given period 
through its literature, pursued a method without reason 
and reasoned without method ; while in history the criticism 
which does not arrange and test its documents can do 
nothing save beat the air * But (7) literary and historical 
criticism are incomplete without a criticism of religion. We 
must know the authenticity, the order, and the origin of 
the literature which is the medium for the expression of 
the constituent and characteristic ideas or beliefs of the 
religion. And we must know the history which shows the 
persons not as sporadic and arbitrary incidents, but as 
actors in a drama which has a unity with the creative 
mind. To know the persons we must study the 
literature which describes them and the ideas they 
believed. But neither the ideas nor the persons can 
be known in isolation; ideas do not come into being 
unbidden; and persons are not uncaused entities 
which can live without corporate being. The two 
are, indeed, relative, for ideas which are articulated in 
institutions produce in persons types of character as dis- 
tinctive as themselves. Hence where there is literature 
there must be history, and where these are religion must 
be, the three being interdependent while distinct. (S) 
Criticism has also to do with doctrine, though not with 
dogma. These differ, indeed, yet are connected. Dogma 
is uttered and sanctioned doctrine, or doctrine decreed by 
a council or a church to be the truth of God. Doctrine is 

* I cannot allow a scholar even as learned and acute as the late Robertson 
Smith to identify "Higher" and "Historical" criticism (T/^e OW Testament 
in the Jewish Church, ist Ed., p. 105). The criticism he described was 
purely literary; but history is distinct from literature, and has a criticism 
of its own. 



DISTINCTION OF DOCTRINE AND DOGMA 25 1 

the principle which a church may teach without any formal 
endorsement; but dogma is the idea which a church has 
judged to be necessary alike to its being and its well-being. 
Doctrine is the unuttered and uncertified truth, tried by 
no council, expressed in no symbol, and accepted by no 
church; dogma is ratified and sanctioned doctrine, faith 
made intelligible and public by being set out in a creed, 
which is enforced by sanctions. Dogma stands in awe of 
the critic, whom it regards as its insatiable foe, expecting 
to receive no mercy from him, as it showed none to him 
in the day of its power. Thus criticism has no quarrel with 
doctrine ; but has an unpitying enemy in dogma. While 
the one knows and reveres it as a friend, the other fears 
and dislikes it as a foe, and a foe who loves to tell un- 
welcome truths. 

2 . As applied to the New Testament, criticism is, therefore, 
but man's method of bringing out the religious signification 
of the Book. It begins by proclaiming the position that on 
this Book, as a foundation of truth and fact, every Christian 
church has built or builds, and could not without its willing 
or reluctant sanction continue to be. This is quite inde- 
pendent of the venerable question — whether the Book of 
our religion owes its being to the Church, and can be read 
and interpreted by its authority alone, or whether the Church 
must be judged by its agreement with the Book. We may, 
indeed, say: what is proved to be of the essence of the 
religion of Jesus, ought not to be made a superficial accident 
in a Christian church; or, conversely, what is of a church's 
essence ought not to be an accident in the religion. If 
either principle is affirmed, the duty is the same: the 
obligation of the Church to study at first hand the docu- 
ments which express the mind of Him through whom and 
for whom it is. 



252 THE OLD TESTAMENT INTRODUCES THE NEW 

While the above may be said to represent positions which 
underUe our discussions as a whole, the principle whence 
it is proposed to start is a special form or mode of historical 
rather than literary criticism. The Old Testament is the 
proper introduction to the New, especially as in ancient 
times Christianity would never have got upon its feet if 
it had not been identified with historical and national 
Judaism. It owed to the religion which preceded it, the 
God it worshipped; and to the synagogue the forms in 
which it worshipped Him. This determines our starting- 
point : God and His worship. 



WORSHIP 

QONG is a given gift, the direct bestowment of the 
^ Almighty, granted that while men hear in a high and 
susceptible mood His truth may speak more potently to 
them. He who possesses this gift can wed strong feeling 
and exalted thought to words so true and real as to need 
noble music for their fit interpretation. But of all songs 
the sublimest is the Psalm which comes by the direct in- 
spiration of God. It has a sound whose voice is like the sea, 
in which the mind of the Eternal becomes articulate in time ; 
it yearns towards the infinite out of which it comes; it 
seeks to wake the Deity which has so long slumbered in man, 
drugged by his senses and numbed by his too conscious 
limitations. And our eighty-fourth Psalm is a song of this 
order, full of a homesickness so pathetic and unutterable 
that nothing save the realization of its desire can cure it. 
But the home is no place which lies to the retrospective 
imagination gleaming with a light that never was on sea or 
shore ; it is constituted by a person, the unborn, the undying 
God. The sickness is of man pining unto utter faintness of 
spirit for Him who is his life. 



253 



254 KNOWLEDGE OF AUTHOR NOT NECESSARY TO 

I 

I. We neither do know, nor need to know, who made 
the Psalm to believe its truth or to feel its inspiration. 
A song may be all the mightier that it is nameless, for 
then it may speak to us with the voice, not of a person, 
but of a race, which is at its highest as if it were the 
voice of God. But this Psalm has been ascribed to David, 
aged and fugitive ; and the view is, if not true to fact, 
yet true to idea. We can conceive him alike in the situation 
that prompted it and with the soul that made it. He had 
a nature that loved best when it had lost, for then it most 
needed and knew its need. But his faith was too strong and 
his soul too strenuous to allow him ever to feel as if he had 
lost God. There are men who in the dense darkness grow 
helpless from the fear that the vanished light may never 
return ; other men only the more wistfully watch for the 
pale gleam on the mountain-top, or the red streak in the 
sky, that tells of the breaking day. And David turned 
as by instinct, his face in the darkness towards the east, 
saw the earliest beams steal up ; and even, while other ears 
were deaf, heard the whisper of the coming dawn. 

Can we imagine him at the moment when this song issued 
like a being breathing thoughtful breath out of his brave 
and quickened spirit? He is an old man, many wintry 
storms have bleached his once ruddy face; passions, now 
indulged and now only ravening the more because denied 
indulgence, have seamed his once smooth cheek; and the 
mind that darkly plotted concerning God, has turned the 
open forehead of youth into the furrowed brow of age. 
The firm and skilful hand that could once sling the unerring 
stone has become feeble and thewless; the nerves that 
never shook or failed have turned into nerves that will 



FAITH IN inspiration; THE PSALM REAL 255 

not be steadied even where danger does not threaten; 
the inflexible will that could tame the lawless bands of 
Adullam has now, through struggles and seductions mani- 
fold, grown too infirm to command his servile court, or 
to control his conquered capital. He is indeed what ought 
to be the most pathetic of all sights to every son of am- 
bition — an exhausted hero sitting in the shadow of his own 
glorious past, uncheered by the dignity of age or by the pros- 
pect of an honoured and reposeful future. And his experi- 
ences had been the bitter products of two ingratitudes, which 
yet were one, a national and a filial. The creation of his man- 
hood's strength could not bear with his age's feebleness ; the 
people the hero had made had utterly forgotten the hero 
who made them. And the shame of the apostasy was 
deepened largely by the vanity of a son. By David's 
side stood the young man Absalom, and to him God had 
given the wonderful gift of beauty, which meant in his case 
the power to win the heart through the eye. He had no 
heroic past; he had done no illustrious deeds, spoken no 
winged words, founded no state, showed no statesmanship ; 
but he was beautiful, and so seemed good, especially to those 
who, without memory or magnanimity, had no soul for 
greatness. His long hair fell in godlike curls on his shoulders, 
and when he stood in the gate — a splendid figure all men 
could see — and dispensed a justice which all could appreci- 
ate, the people, forgetting that his good, like his beauty, was 
inherited, and neither earned nor achieved, said: **How 
glorious he is! how much fitter to be our king than the 
worn-out old man in the palace." They did not think: 
' ' He must be an ignoble youth who has no better use for 
his beauty than to steal the hearts of the people from his 
own father" ; or that '* an ancient hero whom years have en- 
dowed with experience and with wisdom is better than a 



256 THE KING AND ABSALOM HIS SON. 

young man whose only virtue lies in his body, and may best 
be described as physical grace." But instead they argued : 
**The graceful man is also the good, and since he 'stands 
beside the way of the gate' and dispenses justice, we will 
make him our king." They acted as they thought ; and did 
not dream that they reasoned like fools and behaved as 
knaves. And they had their way. Absalom became their 
king and David a fugitive. But as he wandered in the land of 
the stranger, what he mourned was not the lost luxury of his 
palace, nor his perished dignity, nor his stolen kinghood, nor 
the ungrateful infidelity of his people, nor even the filial 
rebellion of his son ; but rather his absence from the temple 
and the worship of his God. And these seemed more 
delightful in retrospect than even in enjoyment; and so 
he cried: ''How lovely are Thy tabernacles, O Jehovah of 
hosts ! My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for the courts 
of Jehovah : my heart and my flesh crieth out for the living 
God." 

2. Here two things are emphasized, and each in terms 
that continue to rise ever higher: (i) the emotions which 
possess the man, and (ii) the object toward which they are 
directed. 

(i) What is here termed the "emotions" may perhaps 
be better described as the imagination which the heart 
speaks through and to. "How amiable are Thy taber- 
nacles." "Amiable" is a foreign word, much depreciated 
in sense by the handling of three hundred years. ' ' Lovely " 
is a better though a homelier word, especially as to us the 
' ' lovely ' ' is also the lovable and the love- worthy . What we 
believe to be good we feel to be beautiful and we trust as 
true. Hence it is what we desire, what the "soul longeth, 
yea, even fainteth" to possess. "Hope deferred maketh 
the heart sick" ; but the hope which is born of love maketh 



BEAUTIFIES THE TEMPLE 257 

the sick heart whole. Yet so penetrative is the love which 
begets hope that ** my heart and my flesh cry out." There 
is such a thing as a consuming desire, though the man who 
desires is not consumed ; and here the desire is as deathless 
as the God who is desired. 

(ii) But it is only the place connected with the worship 
of God that seems lovely through Him. ^^Thy taber- 
nacles, O Jehovah of hosts." The tent of God in Israel 
appeals to the imagination of the exile; he sees in his 
dreams by night and in his visions by day God and the 
people, and he himself amid the people as the king, who yet 
stands before God as a sinner, a man who must worship and 
will praise. And what a fine touch is there: ** Jehovah of 
hosts!" the defeated and defenceless exile trusts in the 
God who commands the hosts of heaven and the armies of 
earth ; and so believes that he does not identify his cause 
with the Eternal, and ask God to avenge him. There is 
no note of insincerity in faith like the appeal which would 
make it God's duty to side with us and vindicate our 
name and claims. But David seeks God for Himself, and 
not for any help in the evil day he may obtain from 
Him. "The courts of the Lord " ; the place where Jehovah 
in His majesty visits the people and the people in their 
humility expiate their sins by sacrifice. "For the living 
God." There the object of love and desire stands in 
splendid simplicity and nakedness. Deity, but the living, 
not a dead God, no idol, the work of man's hands, no 
vacant name, the product of man's mind, no feeble, 
flattered monarch isolated from the lascivious multitude 
by His might and His majesty; but the one "living 
God." The cause of all worship is the cry for God; the 
end of all worship is to satisfy the soul that feels it must 
find God or it will die. 



258 THE TEMPLE, WHETHER HEATHEN OR HEBREW, DIFFERS 

II 

I. We must begin by noting that a Christian church is 
not a temple, whether Hebrew or heathen. These two, 
the temple and the church, are symbols, which signify at 
once similar and dissimilar things. They alike exist for 
the worship of God, but they differ both as regards the 
God they worship and the worship they offer Him. God 
is more and better than man thinks. The temple was the 
distinctive home of the old faiths, the creation of their 
genius and the epitome of their character ; but the church 
is peculiar to the Christian religion, defines its nature and 
reflects its qualities. The temple was built in a sacred 
grove or in a place it consecrated, which signified that God 
was chained to the spot; thither man had to come to find 
Him and to present the offerings He loved. But we build 
our churches in cities and amid the haunts of men; and 
they speak to us of a God who is at home everywhere, can 
be found anywhere, and wherever He is He seeks the souls 
of men whom He loves to save. In the temple the priest 
officiated and offered the sacrifices that pleased his god; 
in the church the people ofTer the sacrifices of prayer and 
praise, and a man with the prophetic gift speaks concern- 
ing the truth of the God whose law ought to rule the whole 
man and to govern every life. In the temple man tried by 
the shedding of blood to propitiate god; in the church a 
gospel of divine grace is preached which commands all 
men everywhere to come to a God who is reconciled. In 
the temple men gave to god that they might get from 
him what he alone could give; but in the church men 
worship a God whose favours they cannot purchase, who 
ever does what becomes Himself, and who has endured 
sorrow and suffered unto sacrifice that He may win 



FROM THE CHURCH AS REGARDS GOD AND HIS WORSHIP 259 

the lost. The deity that dwelt in the temple was thus 
infinitely lower than the God preached in the church; 
the one had a majesty which had hardly escaped from the 
passions of narrow men and the prejudices of the tribe, 
but the other has the beauty and the excellence of a love 
that cannot be quenched. And as the God of the church 
is the more glorious, so also is the man. In the church 
man offers the sacrifice of himself — and he is of too infinite 
a value to be purchased — as well as the obedience of his 
manhood, the love of his life. He does not owe his dignity 
to the tribe or the nation, but it belongs to him by nature : 
he is moral, immortal, a miniature deity, bound by his 
conscience to the throne of the Eternal. These are attri- 
butes no son of the temple was ever conceived to pos- 
sess. The loveliness of Thy church belongs to Thee, 
O God; while to man belongs the spirit that must see 
Thee to live! 

2. The temple and church, which so differ as regards 
their idea of God, differ also in their ideas of worship, 
though to the church belongs the glory that excelleth. 
Let us freely concede to the temple a sensuous sublimity 
which appeals to eye and ear; but for the church we 
claim a spiritual sublimity which appeals to soul and con- 
science. There are men who think that the function of 
religion is to be the minister of art, that high art justi- 
fies religion, that a mean or neglected art passes on it an 
irrevocable condemnation. And such men say to us with 
wearisome iteration: "The ages of faith are behind, and 
the decadence of faith is around. Look at the temples of 
ancient Egypt; how splendidly they become the proud 
inscription which a king carved above a portal he had 
built: 'Made for eternity, time withers before me.' 
Study the massive sculptures which guard, like immobile 



20o IMAGINED SPEECH OF SOME ESTHETE. 

deities, the temples of Assyria, and do they not speak of 
a magnificent faith as well as of a mighty empire? And do 
we not owe Greek art, which we modern men love to de- 
scribe as the apotheosis of the beautiful, to Greek religion? 
And was not this art so religious that a man who looked 
upon the image of Zeus stole out as from the divine pres- 
ence, saying, 'Lo! I have beheld God'? Or take the 
marvellous cathedrals of our own Middle Ages, with a 
space which seems vast as heaven, with pillars so immense 
as to suggest the invisible shafts that hold up the starry 
roof of earth with aisles and arches, rounded or pointed, 
which were made to reverberate with song, — do they not 
recall the mighty avenues of the primeval forest, with 
tracery so delicately wrought as to be most beautiful where 
most grotesque? In their very shape the Christian religion 
is expressed, its history in the names and uses of their 
several parts; its doctrines are symbolized in altars, 
windows, steps, chapels ; its virtues in the seats men filled 
and the places they occupied. May we not say, then, that 
the faith the ages had lived by built itself in temple or 
cathedral as by celestial art an everlasting monument ? And 
now compare with these temples and cathedrals the poor 
and hideous, the unstable and impermanent, places men 
now erect for what they are pleased to call 'worship.' 
What are they but meeting-houses that know no comfort 
and give no inspiration, or chapels of horrid and hybrid 
Gothic, built by artifice and patchwork of shoddy brick 
or tasteless stone, mere shops where men may preach 
or persons pray, but where no lover of art can demean 
himself by worshipping? For as is the place such will be 
the transactions within it. The ancient worship suited 
the ancient temple, the robed priests, the singing men, the 
stately music fitly rendered by a full-throated choir, the 



BUT THE MAN OF ART DOES NOT KNOW RELIGION 26 1 

OX perfumed and garlanded for the sacrifice, the procession 
that wound in and out of the sacred groves as if they feared 
to come in unseemly haste into the awful presence of the 
Deity. And the cathedral was fitly built and endowed for 
mediaeval worship. So was the monastery, where the 
monk, who ceased to kneel on the cold stone floor of his 
cell, silently stole out that he might with his brothers glide 
into the church where they all raised their voices in the 
matin or the vesper hymn ; and while the world hastened to 
its commerce or to its sin they uplifted to God an awed yet 
beautiful worship. But what a contrast to all this do you 
find in the begrimed men, in the ill-dressed or the over- 
dressed women, who meet in our modern chapels to sing 
fulsome hymns or utter vulgar and familiar prayers to a 
Deity they make too like themselves to stand in awe of!" 

3. So speaks the man of art concerning what he conceives 
to be the artistic and the inartistic in worship. But is he not 
in each case indulging an uninformed imagination? There 
is a nobler art than any known to the fine arts — the art 
of making men, of governing life, of forming states, of 
realizing an ordered freedom. When we are told that 
ancient religion was the mother of art, and ancient art 
the minister and exponent of religion, we ask, What 
of the people? How did they stand related to the re- 
ligion? Was it their moral master, or they its ethical 
servants? Did it think of them, educate, emancipate, up- 
lift, refine them? If it failed to benefit the humanity in 
man for which all art is, can it be said to have cultivated or 
achieved the highest of all the arts ? Were not the ancient 
religions one and all sectional ? The gods of Egypt were for 
the Egyptian and for no other man; the conquests of the 
Assyrian monarch glorified the deities of Assyria; and Greek 
religion was the property of none but Greek men. And not 



262 CHRISTIAN RELIGION IN RELATION TO OTHER RELIGIONS. 

every man who lived in Greece and spoke its tongue was 
Greek; nay, in a city like Athens the Greek was but one 
man in four. And to the slave the religion had no message, 
and he for it had no being. Even in Israel the Hebrew 
alone could worship Jehovah; the people who knew not 
the law were accursed. God might know them, but they 
did not know Him. 

On the other hand, how is the Christian religion re- 
lated to man? It knows no race, is confined to no class, 
but stands open to all. In the congregation, which to 
the man of art is but a vulgar multitude, what can the 
eye of insight see? Not faces or dresses, but souls; 
not manners, but men; not a multitude of impossibly 
perfect units, but a crowd of potential persons, an epitome 
of mankind. Here is an old man with all his ancient pas- 
sions burnt out and become cold, dark ashes, asking pardon 
of a God to whom he can give nothing but dumb grati- 
tude; and there is a woman who was yesterday a wife and 
to-day is a widow, seeking comfort for a sorrow time cannot 
heal. Here sits a merchant who a year since thought him- 
self rich beyond the dreams of avarice, and now knows 
that he is poor in friends and penniless, lifting a sore heart 
to Him who can alone read his troubles ; and there beside 
him sits a successful man who, born in poverty, now rolls 
in wealth and who needs the thought of the Eternal God 
to keep him humble and mindful of duty. Hidden in a 
dark corner is a guilty man who bears upon his soul the 
curse of the innocence he seduced; and near him is a 
tempted man who does not desire to fall, but feels himself 
too weak to stand. Full in the sunlight, with a voice too 
thick to be heard in praise, sits a husband who has become 
a father and feels as if he had passed through the very 
gates of death only to find all the sluices of hope and joy 



MAN ENLARGED BY CONGREGATIONAL WORSHIP 263 

Open and pouring upon his soul their living waters. And not 
far off is a youth who a year ago left home a simple boy 
and has grown by temptation resisted into a purposeful 
man ; a new-made mother who wishes to find a voice that 
shall express her inarticulate yet irrepressible gladness; 
an aged woman who has seen for no sin of hers the fruit 
of her body wither and die ; a family of orphans who know 
not what they have lost; and a childless pair who once 
knew the sounds that make the parents' hearts glad and 
can know them no more. But who can see or tell all 
that a single congregation has to show? Man is there 
as he is before God, with all his infinite promise, his 
failures and achievements, his hopes and fears ; woman is 
there with her loves and sorrows, her hopes that cannot 
be spoken, the faith that many waters cannot drown, the 
desire that disappointment is unable to extinguish. Time 
is there, though holding eternity within it; vice is there, 
seeking with tears the way back to virtue; there is the 
chastity that never blushed for shame, and the lust that 
is ashamed to blush; the world is there, and there God is 
to meet the world. Nay, what is a congregation but a 
splendid moment of crowded being, where all men are im- 
mortal and all may attain the beatific vision, where souls 
who have lost paradise struggle to regain it; and He 
who guards its gates at once woos and awes, invites and 
winnows, those who would enter. Who will say that any- 
thing grander in dream or reality ever came into the 
imagination of man than the vision which the most prosaic 
and commonplace congregation unrolls before him who has 
eyes to see? The things I have said I have seen; and he 
who knows living men will know that my testimony is 
true. 



2 04 THE CHURCH A SPIRITUAL HOUSE; ITS WORSHIP A TWO- 

III 

The Christian church, then, which has displaced the 
temple, whether Hebrew or heathen, may be defined as 
the spiritual home of the Christian man — where he was 
born, where rise and whence flow the springs of his higher 
life, and whither he comes to worship God and to realize his 
own manhood in and through the worship of Him. Hence 
comes the question, What is Christian worship ? In what 
respects does it, as conducted by the congregation and 
within the church, bear a distinctive character? 

1 . Worship in its fundamental idea may be said to be the 
speech of God to man and of man to God. It is therefore 
a two-sided activity, expressing the reciprocal action of 
two consciously related beings, God and man. This idea is 
generic, common to all religions, whether they use a grove 
or a mosque, a temple or a church. Where the specific 
Christian elements appear is in the quality and character 
of the beings related, and therefore in the way man takes 
and the acts he does to please and adore God. Out of 
these differences grow the points which have now to be 
discussed. 

2. In Christian worship a living man cries unto the 
living God, and the living God speaks responsively to the 
living man. Were God dumb and incapable of speech, 
man could not worship Him, for what communion can the 
living hold with the dead, or he who uses a language with 
him for whom no language is? Eternity is an impressive 
thought, but man cannot worship eternity, for how can 
he pray to that which has no ear to hear, no power to 
help? Immensity may embosom him, but how can he 
commune with a space that does not know him and has 
no heart to love? The deeper the impulses that move 



SIDED ACTIVITY. TAYLOR'S STORY CONCERNING ABRAHAM 265 

man to worship, the more must the God he needs be aHve. 
There is, as said Jeremy Taylor, in the old books of the 
Jews, a story concerning the call of Abraham, which illus- 
trates man's need of a living God * When Abraham first 
heard the voice of God and knew that the Eternal had 
spoken to him, he watched the great stars come out in 
heaven, and said, ''These are He"; but they faded, and 
the patriarch thought, ''They cannot be the Eternal, for 
He abideth always and fadeth never." Then the pale- 
faced moon climbed the sky, and he cried, "Lo! this orb 
so calm, so pure, so silvern and lovely, this, this is He." 
But the moon tarried not, for, shot out of the East, came 
the golden shafts of the sun, and he in his chariot of fire 
rode gloriously across the arch of heaven. He moved the 
patriarch to the admiration whose very breath is praise 
and whose soul is worship. But the sun hastened west- 
ward and died amid the red and radiant hues which the 
clouds caught from his face, leaving the sky to night and 

* Let me here give " the story " which Jeremy Taylor introduces by the 
saying attributed to him in the text. It stands at the end of his Liberty of 
Prophesying. "' When Abraham sat at his tent-door, according to his 
custom, waiting to entertain strangers, he espied an old man stooping and 
leaning on his staff, weary with age and travail, coming towards him, who 
was a hundred years of age : he received him kindly, washed his feet, pro- 
vided supper, caused him to sit down : but, observing that the old man eat 
and prayed not, nor begged for a blessing on his meat, he asked him why he 
did not worship the God of heaven. The old man told him that he wor- 
shipped the fire only, and acknowledged no other god. At which answer 
Abraham grew so zealously angry, that he thrust the old man out of his 
tent, and exposed him to all the evils of the night, and an unguarded con- 
dition. When the old man was gone, God called to Abraham, and asked him 
where the stranger was : he replied, ' I thrust him away because he did not 
worship thee.' God answered him, ' I have suffered him these hundred 
years, although he dishonoured me : and couldst not thou endure him one 
night, when he gave thee no trouble ? ' Upon this Abraham fetched him 
back again, and gave him hospitable entertainment and wise instruction.' 
Go thou and do likewise, and thy charity will be rewarded by the God of 
Abraham." 



266 THE LIVING GOD MUST GOVERN. 

the earth to darkness. And Abraham said: "The Eternal 
is greater than these; He neither riseth nor setteth, for 
Him there is neither day nor night ; He made all things, and 
is Himself unmade. Him only will I worship, for He alone 
lives." And other than a "living God" no man can wor- 
ship; and where man feels his need and finds this God 
he can do no other than worship Him. 

But the "living God" must govern; man seeks a God, 
but it is a Sovereign he finds. A deity that did not rule 
might be a fiction of Epicurean romance, but could not 
be the authority which men who adore must obey. We 
judge the mother unnatural who deserts her own offspring. 
What, then, would a God be who made a world and left 
it to wander unguided and unblest through space? But 
He who loves and rules must be good if we are to worship 
Him. Where no love is, no reverence can be; and good- 
ness can alone evoke the love whose speech is worship. 
Hate may curse, fear may abhor, suspicion may dislike or 
even dread, indifference may become cynical, and the cynic 
easily changes into the sceptic ; but from all these worship 
is remote. Where utmost need, and trust, and reverence, 
and admiration, and desire are bound together by an affec- 
tion that will let no one of them go, there is the love whose 
life is worship and whose speech is adoration. And the one 
and the only Being who can evoke and satisfy all these 
at once is "the living God." 

3. But there can be no object of worship without a sub- 
ject or person who worships; and if God is the object, man 
is the subject. It is not indeed man empirical, clothed in the 
accidents of time and place, but man essential and universal, 
individuated, isolated, the man who stands face to face with 
God, just as if in all the universe there were only two 
persons, God and the soul. It is an awful and oppressive 



MAN AS NECESSARY TO WORSHIP AS GOD 267 

thing to feel: ''I am and God is; He may be gracious 
to me, but He is angry at the sins which I love, and I 
would fain escape from Him that I may dwell with my 
pleasures and my sins. But I cannot; for He besets me 
behind and before, and forces me to know that a being 
made to be a native of eternity must live as an alien in 
time." 

Outside the church, what are we ? Physicians, men 
who fight a noble battle against physical suffering, the 
causes that enfeeble, the diseases that kill; or lawyers, 
men who know the affairs and the souls of their clients, and 
advise with equal equanimity the knave who has come within 
the clutches of the law and the honest man whom the knave 
has deceived; or men of business, shrewd, calculating, 
well versed in the share list, in the ways of the ships on 
the sea, the cargoes they carry, the markets whence they 
have come and to which they go ; or workmen, hard of hand, 
rheumatic of shoulder, wriggling in the grip of their union, 
or by its help wrestling with their masters for something 
more and better than a living wage ; or mistresses weary 
with the ways of servants; or servants sick of the whims 
of mistresses ; or seamstresses who have sewn with double 
thread the shirt and the shroud ; or harassed shopwomen ; 
or mothers deafened with the clamour of the children; 
or wives who yearn for the child that has not come. But 
inside the church, what are we ? Souls, from whom time 
and its accidents, — rank, status, social dignity or the want 
of it, esteem or disesteem, — have all fallen away; and we 
stand robed in immortality, sinful and penitent or saintly 
and jubilant, before the eternal God. In the place where we 
worship we know neither poor man nor rich, neither master 
nor servant, neither lords nor commons, but only men; 
but to know men is to know infinitely more than all their 



268 WORSHIP OFFERED MUST BE AS IS THE OFFERER. 

titles can signify, all their possessions or professions can 
represent. For it is all of us God cares to know and all in 
us that can know God. The Alps seen from below rear 
their heads crowned with unsullied snow into the eternal 
sunlight, and they look glorious and grand; but seen 
from above they lose their proud altitude, and fade into 
the common dark earth, which owes all the light in which it 
lives to the sun which shines in the heavens. And social 
distinctions may loom large to the eyes that look from 
without and beneath ; but to him who sees with the eyes of 
God these distinctions perish, though the real man remains. 
For the presence of God levels all only that all may be 
dignified. Before Him the meanest becomes glorious as a 
bud of immortal being; and the most distinguished loses 
his social preeminence that he may enter through the 
gate of humility the kingdom of heaven. In a state without 
religion the social transcendence of some men may well 
become through the power it gives on the one hand, and 
the envy it creates on the other, a danger to society; but 
where the ideal of worship reigns, rich and poor meet 
together before the Lord, who is the maker of them all. 
4. Let no man think that I write as a dreamer rather than 
as a seer. Let us consider the influence and action of six 
days of toil on the workman, or business worries, calcula- 
tions, and cares on the merchant ; civil distractions, political 
and party harassments on the statesman ; domestic burdens 
and family anxieties on the mother; social dissipations, 
diversions, jealousies, and small ambitions, whose very 
fulfilment belittles and dissatisfies, on the people who 
constitute society; and would you say the influence is 
good and the action beneficent ? This state of mind was 
what the older evangelicals termed worldliness. It was 
the mind for which there was no God, no conscience, no 



WHAT WORLDLINESS MEANT TO OUR FATHERS 269 

duty, no truth, no ideal to be lived for, no hell to be avoided, 
no heaven to be won; for there was only riches to be gained, 
success to be achieved, a business to be pushed, a family to be 
maintained in dress and decorum. In the so-called upper 
classes it was love of dignity, place, power, recognition by 
royalty, and social leadership; in the so-termed middle 
classes it was comfort, prosperity, the full barn and the ample 
treasury, well-to-do-ness as the essence of well-being ; and in 
the class we name lower it was greed for better wages, 
absorption in physical toil, love of brutal sports. In each 
class worldliness had certain characteristic forms, but its 
spirit was one and common to all. It was the passion to 
live as if there was no world but this; as if man was all 
body and no soul ; as if there was no God but fashion or 
success or coarse amusements; as if there was nothing 
worth living for but gaiety or gain, work or sleep. Now 
what kind of men would this passion make ? Brutal men, 
who loved their own happiness, and were careless as to the 
means of attaining it ; greedy men, who loved gold, and did 
not mind what it cost to get it; lustful men, who never 
thought whether they had a soul to save or lose ; frivolous 
women, who liked to be beautiful and did not care to be 
good. And out of such persons could moral men be made, 
or an ordered society, or a happy and contented state? 

Why — 

"Dragons of the prime, 

Who tear each other in the slime 

Make mellow music matched with men." 

But take from us our worship, and what would remain save 
this mind and men such as these ? Without the churches 
where should we have a force strong enough to break the 
chain of secular causes that binds our days together and 
prevents us resting our weary limbs from the dismal mo- 
notony of the treadmill, or lifting our eyes to see beyond 



270 WORSHIP LIFTS OUT OF TIME INTO ETERNITY. 

the prison walls the land that is very far off? Our very 
presence in a congregation is a confession of our belief in 
a higher world than this, where a nobler and more ideal 
order reigns, where souls realize their immortality and live 
in harmony with each other and with God. In worship we 
are lifted out of time into eternity, we listen to its voices, 
we speak to the Most High and hear Him speak to us. We 
lose the taint of the world, forget all social and servile 
distinctions, and become "fellow-citizens with the saints 
and of the household of God." As brothers we sing the 
same psalm and join in the common prayer; and though 
we may later in the public arena strive for the mastery, 
yet the memory of the hour we passed together before the 
throne of God can never wholly fade or allow either to 
appear to the other as common or unclean. 



IV 

But it is not enough to describe the God man worships 
and the man who worships God ; it is quite as necessary 
to ask, What is worship? What special acts constitute 
it? We have seen that worship must be conceived as a 
reciprocal activity, the speech and action of man towards 
God as well as of God towards man. If either be dumb or 
irresponsive there can be no worship. Man cannot adore an 
indifferent or absent God ; a living and a holy God can 
have no pleasure in a dead or in a wicked man. 

I. We have to consider in what ways man can most 
appropriately worship. He addresses God in two forms, 
praise and prayer. Now these, so far as public, have one 
characteristic in common, each must be at once personal and 
peculiar, special to each several worshipper; and general 
or catholic, the act and deed of the congregation as a 



t 



• 



WHAT IS WORSHIP AND HOW MAN MUST WORSHIP 27 1 

whole. No man can worship God by proxy, whether by 
means of a hired representative who does it for money, 
or by means of a spiritual delegate who is qualified by his 
office and acts out of love. But if the worship is to be of 
the people as a whole, the person must be fused in the 
society; he must cease to be an individual, and merge his 
being in the larger unity. This double aspect, the personal 
and the collective, of man's part in worship must be always 
kept in view. 

2. Praise must be personal yet collective, because expres- 
sive of the gratitude and adoration at once of the individual 
and of the multitude. What concern has the heart that 
knows neither joy nor affection nor admiration with song? 
But song is the natural speech of the happy and grateful 
spirit. And this means that no choir as a choir can praise 
God ; no anthem as an anthem, however perfect the music 
to which it is set, can realize the ideal of worship ; that is 
only possible to the people of God as His people. This does 
not mean that our praise is to be unmusical or discordant, is 
to be droned out or brayed forth without any attempt at 
harmony in the expression, or ''linked sweetness" in the 
sounds. On the contrary, the more agreeable we can make " 
it the more congregational it will become ; the less it offends 
the most sensitive ear the better will it express the gratitude 
of the humblest heart. The soul will give it the note of 
conviction and sincerity which pleases Heaven ; the con- 
gregation will give it the concord which is grateful to man. 
To secure this the organ and the choir may be alike necessary ; 
but they are needful as helps to man, while it is the man 
himself who is needful to the praise of God. And if music 
is not to be despised as a factor of the tuneful concord Avhich 
wins man to praise, neither is the psalm or hymn in which 
he attempts to express it. And here let me say, we ought 



272 PRAISE AN ESSENTIAL ELEMENT IN WORSHIP. 

to be more jealous of the words we sing than of the music 
we sing them to. The two indeed are so related that sub- 
lime words demand sublime music for their interpretation ; 
but the words are before the music, and speak a wider and 
more intelligible language. 

The ancient Hebrew psalm is distinguished from the 
modern hymn by the greater space it gives to the 
majesty of God; the modern hymn is distinguished 
from the ancient psalm by the greater emphasis it lays 
on the emotions and the weaknesses, the loves and the 
despairs of man. The antithesis may be too absolute to be 
accurate in all the details it involves ; yet it is roundly true. 
In the Hebrew Psalms there is much that is subjective, per- 
sonal, petty, and vindictive ; but the idea that stands in the 
foreground and gives character to all behind and around it 
is the sovereignty, the eternity, the all-sufficiency of God. 
In our modern Christian hymns a few have an exalted idea 
of the divine majesty, but the immense majority are more 
petty than sublime, are trivial, beautiful perhaps, but not 
practical, mirrors of a weary and sensuous rather than a 
strong and spiritual faith. I am grateful that my childhood 
was nurtured on the Book of Psalms rather than on the 
jingling verses that celebrate the ''Sweet Saviour," or 
protest how I love "my Jesus." Well do I remember the 
old barn-like meeting-house to which I was taken as a 
child, and where I went as a boy, with its bare walls, its 
unpainted windows, its unstained, high-backed, square 
family pews; the long sermon, the hard, worn, furrowed 
faces, now, alas ! all turned into dust ; the low, stern grumble 
or high falsetto that then seemed the fittest voice for praise. 
But one memory to-day drowns and dwarfs all these, the 
sense that old congregation and those ancestors and kinsfolk 
of mine had for the majesty of God, and the reality to them 



DIFFERENCE YET SIMILARITY OF PRAYER AND PRAISE 273 

of the inspired Psalms to which they owed it; Their 
praise expressed their awe before the God in whom they 
believed, their gratitude for the salvation His grace had 
wrought, and their utter surrender of themselves to His will 
and guidance. And daily my prayer would be: let our 
praise speak a faith as strenuous and true as theirs in 
language as musical as our own ; and our worship will be 
not unworthy of the acceptance of the God of our fathers. 

3. Prayer is a more complex act than praise, for while 
as broadly congregational, it ought to be more deeply 
personal. In praise we exult in God — the love, the grati- 
tude, the reverence, and the adoration within us break into 
the song whose words are winged by music ; but in prayer 
we commune with God, plead with Him, show Him in 
confession our souls as we see them, that He may show 
them to us as He sees them. Praise mainly relates to 
what God has done; prayer to what we hope He may do. 
We ask from Him new mercies in order that the old mercies 
may not be in vain. Praise concerns the past, but prayer 
the present and the future. It is full, therefore, of the 
infinite needs of rrian. Could we listen with the ear of God 
to the cries, articulate and inarticulate, that daily rise 
from earth to heaven, we should know as we never knew 
before how God must pity to be just; how pathetic is the 
life of him who knows only a brief moment of being and 
knows neither the eternity behind nor the eternity before ; 
how heart clings to heart and seeks nothing more from 
God than to be allowed to praise Him; how reluctantly 
men sin and how earnestly they beseech pardon. 

And it is this intensely personal character of prayer that 
makes it at once so necessary to the man and so difficult to 
the congregation. The things man most needs from God he 
can least bear to ask in the hearing of men; the things 



274 PRAYER PERSONAL YET CONGREGATIONAL: THE CON- 

the whole congregation needs may meet the case of no 
single man. A book of Common Prayer does not overcome 
the difficulty, for though its language may be stately its 
range is limited, and the statelier the speech the less may 
it be able to restrain the passion or utter the desire of the 
heart.* And where prayer is free and the voice that utters 
the prayer but one, the congregation may feel as if it listened 
to a man praying rather than prayed with the man. For the 
prayer to be congregational, then, the minister must be the 
people, and the people must become the minister. There is 
music without words, and there is prayer without speech; 
for prayer is constituted not by the words used, but by the 
faith they express, and while the minister may find the 
words the congregation supply the faith. In prayer, then, 
the minister is the vicar of his people ; he stands in their place 
and pleads in their name before God. He loses his personal 
being and becomes, as it were, a collective person. A 
whole people speaks through his voice, confesses sin, im- 
plores forgiveness, pleads for help, asks consolation, utters 
thanksgiving, beseeches God to be merciful to men ere 
they go hence and are no more. When the minister kneels 
morning and evening in his own study he may feel a miser- 
able sinner with a self of his own which needs to be forgiven, 
directed, strengthened, enlightened; but when he prays 
amid his people his personal consciousness is dissolved or 
enlarged into theirs, and he becomes a voice, making their 
prayer articulate, confessing the sins that lie on their 
consciences, the enmities that slumber in their hearts, the 
sorrows that corrode their spirits, the graces that adorn 
and make beautiful their lives. And this means that what 
he, as we imagine him, feels all ought to feel ; if a petition 

* I have never, save once, heard free or spontaneous prayer criticized; and 
I have never forgotten the criticism: "The prayer was too literary." 



GREGATION A MAN, A MAN THE WHOLE CONGREGATION 275 

be my brother's, it ought to be mine; if a confession be 
mine, it ought to be his. In Christian prayer the one is 
the all and the all is the one; the congregation is a man, 
the man is a whole congregation, with all its infinite needs 
and desires articulated before God. Were this ideal real- 
ized, what a sanctity would belong to the congregation, 
and what a sacred power to its act of worship ! 



V 

I. Praise and prayer are man's acts, modes in which 
he speaks to God ; but now what of God's speech to man ? 
The divine response to human needs is as varied as the 
needs to which it responds ; it is distilled in all the influences 
and distributed by all the agencies proper to the religion. 
The building as a creation of human faith, and the congre- 
gation as an assemblage of believing men, alike speak of 
God and the eternity which environs us. Every good man is 
like a vessel charged with divine grace. The schools where 
we try to train our children to godliness; the societies 
where we think of those whom man profanely terms the 
lower races as souls Christ died to save ; the mission rooms 
where we seek to reach our unfortunates at home; the 
philanthropies we cultivate; the enthusiasms for justice 
and truth we labour to beget and foster — testify to a God 
who works without ceasing in man on behalf of men. Then 
the stated days on which and the purposes for which we 
assemble to seek God, to meditate on His truth, to hold 
the attitude of a disciple and to learn of Him, to listen 
with a susceptible ear to the voice too soft and still to be 
heard amid the din and clangour of our weekly toil — 
witness to the need which the living man feels for inter- 
course with the living God. And does not the experience 



276 THE SERMON AS GOD'S RESPONSE TO THE 

of the humblest and the proudest aHke attest these facts : — 
that in the congregation dwell the influences that counter- 
act the secular forces which beat upon us so fiercely during 
the week ; that in worship are begotten the impulses which 
shape our common clay to nobler uses; and that when 
we meet God our horizon is widened till it becomes an im- 
mensity without limit, our mortal outlook lengthened into 
the eternity which is His home ? 

2. But these are all impersonal influences rather than 
personal speech; and did they stand alone, our worship 
would represent only the indirect benefits of our aspira- 
tion towards God, not the direct gain of His immediate 
converse with us. And a Deity who would not respond 
to our speech were, to use John Howe's word, "incon- 
versible"; one who would make all our worship unreal 
and vain. The man who speaks to God in the name of 
the people ought also to be able to speak to the people in 
the name of God. It is here where the awful and solemn 
function of the sermon appears; it ought to come as the 
response of God to the cry of man, as the uprising of His 
light upon those who were sitting in darkness, half inclined 
to fear that the dawn might never come. It is profane 
as well as impertinent to describe what is termed the 
Eucharist as ''the supreme act of Christian worship." 
What in days of deeper reverence and greater simplicity 
used to be called by an English name, the ''Lord's Sup- 
per," is now denoted by a Greek one; and is, when said to 
be "an act of worship," placed where neither Christ nor 
His apostles* ever intended it to be. Augustine, with more 

* Out of the six men who contribute canonical epistles which explain the 
doctrines of the religion of Christ, only one has anything to say touching the 
so-called Eucharist and its observances or ceremonies. He is, too, a man who 
wrote no gospel, and throws doubt upon his own personal knowledge of Jesus, 
which he calls knowing " Christ after the flesh" (Cor. v. 16). 



soul; and man's supreme act of worship 277 

genuine insight than any modern, termed the "Supper" a 
'Visible word," a phrase which suggested the high doctrine 
of Calvin and the higher doctrine of Zwingli, and which 
expressed the truth that the rite was a ''sacrament," but not 
a "sacrifice." Jesus neither thinks nor speaks in ritual ; the 
very mysteries of the faith are expressed not in ceremonies 
men must observe, but in language they can comprehend. 
Hence He is spoken of and to as Rabbi,* with a royal, not 
with a priestly descent, which He claimed to be illus- 
trated in His own historical person . f He is by preeminence 
the teacher and the preacher, and what He hath He gave. 
His command to His apostles was, "Go, preach the 
Gospel." That preaching has not been continuous; there 
have been great periods when men have been silent, not 
governed by the enthusiasm of speech; or when the en- 
thusiasm has, as it were, been laid asleep and waited for a 
resurrection. 

3 . Yet out of preaching what has come ? There came the 
apostolic churches that stood in the cities round the tideless 
Mediterranean. Out of preaching came the conversion of 
those great barbarian peoples who poured into Rome, and 
yet were made more Christian by so pouring. Out of it 
came those missions represented in the far north by 
Columba and the men of lona, who gave their early 
character to the people of my land; out of it came 
Augustine of Canterbury, who came late to these Southern 
people and ought to have come earlier, bringing what 
was later in origin, and in nature different through long 
delay. Then there went from our islands away back to the 
Continent, Saxon, Scottish, and Irish preachers, creating 

* Matt. xxvi. 49 (cf. Mark xiv. 45); Mark ix. 5, xi. 21; John i. 39, 50; 
Hi. 2 ; iv. 31 ; xi. 8. 

t Matt. xxii. 41-5; Mark xii. 35-9; cf. Matt. i. 20; Luke i. 27; ii. 4. 



278 WHAT PREACHING HAS PRODUCED. 

homes of light where darkness might have seemed to be. 
As a consequence there came the conversion of the 
Northern nations, achieved by preaching. And what was 
the Reformation except a resurrection of the ancient func- 
tion of preaching ? And what were the Reformers — men 
Hke Luther, Zwingli, (Ecolampadius, Calvin, Beza — save 
preachers? Would not the enumeration of them be but 
the naming of men great in literature because great in 
speech ? Was not the sermon, the appeal to reason and 
experience, its great instrument ? and was not the counter- 
Reformation accomplished by the same great instrument ? 
Could Richard Hooker have been the man he was, or have 
written his Ecclesiastical Polity, unless he had been a preacher, 
who had Travers to compete with, in the ''spacious days 
of great Elizabeth" ? Or without the Golden Grove would 
Jeremy Taylor have had a name fragrant in letters ? Did 
not the sermon awake Richard Baxter and compel him to 
compose those sermons that seemed, in spite of their meta- 
physical subtlety and refinements, to his contemporaries 
so like ''logic on fire"? Did not John Bunyan through 
hearing a preacher become our supreme allegorist in litera- 
ture and history ? Was not stately John Howe made by the 
appeals of ' ' golden-mouthed ' ' Stephen Marshall ; and by the 
same agency three generations of Edmund Calamys, and 
simple-hearted and subtle-minded Isaac Watts ? Were not 
the sermons of John Wesley and George Whitefield causes 
that helped to bring about the evangelical Revival ; and is 
not their successor, John Henry Newman, better ren)embered 
as a preacher than as a celebrant ? Great, therefore, is the 
power of the pulpit and of human speech, which here 
means the truth of God, though His truth as realized in 
the awed and reverent spirit of man. 

4. I know I shall be pardoned one personal reminiscence. 



A 'WAKING VISION ON A SCOTTISH HILLSIDE 279 

Well, then, in the summer of 1894 I hurried away from 
Oxford to the land of 

''brown heath and shaggy wood" 

which lies to the north of Tweed, where I, at least, can 
breathe ancestral air such as was once breathed by men 
often dumb yet never silent. In the town of Oxford the 
British Association had met, and there had gathered the 
many illustrious men that make the name of England 
famous in science, together with distinguished men from 
many lands, who had come to mingle their discoveries 
with ours and to hear from us what discoveries we had 
made. Just a week after I had left Oxford and all its fame, 
and all its brilliance, I stood on a height which overlooked 
what is to me the loveliest spot on earth, for it is near my 
own childhood's home. In the distance there rose the grey 
back, crowned with a lion's head, of Arthur's Seat, and up 
from beyond it rose the smoke of the grey northern city, 
whose buildings upheaved their backs to heaven, and were — 

Piled deep and massy, close and high, 
Mine own romantic town. 

Between me and the lion-crowned height ran a little 
stream, over which battle and feud had often flowed, 
and which had run red with good Scotch blood. Just 
behind me was the tower where, when they had captured 
him, they brought George Wishart on his way to the scaf- 
fold and death, one of the many martyrs which our people 
gave to the evangelical faith. On my right hand and a 
little behind me lay the small country town where, about 
370 years since, a brawny, stalwart youth lived, studied, 
worked, planned, who was called of God and grew into a 
man of whom it was said, though not till he lay silent in 
death, that "he never feared man's face," who cast out 



28o THE KIND OF MEN WHO MADE OUR 

from amid his people a form of religion that had lost power 
to control men, and so had become mischievous ; and created 
schools in every parish, planning also that high schools, 
which he described, should be in every considerable town. 
My people may have many a sin and weakness, yet, thanks 
to him, they are a people of whom it can be said they are 
at least educated and love education. On the other side of 
the Firth, beyond the radiant water, at the farther end 
of the land where it looks out into the North Sea, lies the 
quaint university town where the one famed son of the 
Renaissance our kingdom can boast, George Buchanan — 
though among his successors Andrew Melville stands, who 
runs him close — once held sway, and where in the same 
office the man reigned who, most of all, can be esteemed 
as the saintly man of our race, and where he died, just as 
Charles II came to the throne. When the summons came 
to him to appear before the monarch and his judges, the 
answer came — ** I go to obey an earlier summons from a 
greater King." He, in his very death, felt that in the 
distant parish of his earliest ministry and love, Anwoth, 
if there lived but one soul, lost through him, then the 
thought of that loss would make heaven so great a misery 
that to leave it and come to earth, where he might 
emulate his Saviour and suffer and die for the lost, 
would be to him almost a joy. And northward and 
westward I could see the peaks of hills beneath which 
Portmoak lay, where a man called in his day Ebenezer 
Erskine once was minister, a brawny man and the father of 
a stalwart race, who helped to make the religion of Christ 
more of the power it is amid our people. Still farther to the 
north imagination could picture the braes of Abernethy, 
where John Brown had herded his sheep while he studied his 
Latin, and learned theGreek NewTestament, whichenabled 



NORTHERN PEOPLE WERE ALL PREACHERS 28 1 

him even as boy to win eminence in learning and fame for his 
church, and the patience and tact which gained him later 
a professor's place. He became a father to many, and 
grew into a preacher so known and a scholar so famed 
that David Hume once said, infidel as he was, ''I like 
that man, for he preaches as if he had Jesus Christ at 
his elbow." And on the same side of the water, just 
touching the Forth, washed by its waves, lay the town 
— if town it can be called — of Anstruther, where in the late 
years of the eighteenth century the muscular and masculine 
Thomas Chalmers laid up the health and strength that made 
him the reviver of the church in Scotland. And behind me, 
between me and the Lammermoors, nestled the little village, 
placid as ever, where Robert Moffat first saw the light of day, 
which still stands with us and for our people as the symbol 
of the preacher's work. Surely as the procession of names 
passed before me, did it not seem that what made the 
places beautiful were the persons they suggested, whose 
very names told that, not kings and nobles, but preachers 
had made my people ; and that while Christ lived incor- 
porated in such men and inspired them with the power of 
reforming and converting man, there was neither promise 
nor threat of decay on the part either of Him or His church. 
5. Some conclusory words may now be written as to the 
sort of man who can best represent God to the people and 
the people before God. ''Minister" stands opposed to 
''magister," as the little man who serves to the big man 
who commands, the ''master" who possesses that he may 
communicate, and knows what he teaches. It may seem 
a paradox, and will so prove to many, though it is a mere 
truism to me to say, from the apotheosis of the church and 
sacraments has come the deterioration of the ministry ; for 
we cannot magnify any office without minimizing the man- 



282 DISTINCTION BETWEEN " MAGISTER " AND '* MINISTER " 

hood of the persons who fill it. Man finds it easier to rely 
on the sacro-sanctities of ofiftce than on the eminence of 
character and the dignities of culture. And the man who 
has studied most does not stand in proud isolation or pre- 
eminence beside men, but walks humbly with his God. 
The preacher who stands in the succession of the prophet 
rather than the priest does not bear his burdens in his 
own strength; but is maintained in the exercise of his 
majestic functions by the feeling of his responsibilities to 
God and men. The minister is the servant of duty, not the 
slave of expediency ; he looks at time and all that is within 
it through eternity, and he does not shrink from speaking 
to the souls entrusted to him the truth which is duty, and 
which God has spoken to those who listen for His voice. 

We seem to have wandered far, though we have not, from 
the idea of a worship which is simply the communion of 
man with God and the correlative communion of God with 
man; but to realize this idea is in the long run dependent 
on the Being man worships. And God is not conceived here 
as a sort of Oriental potentate, who keeps man afar off, 
speaking to him mainly in symbols, who is pleased with our 
fragrant incense and gratified by our musical praise; but 
as the Father of spirits, a Being whose worship must be 
filial through and through. This He seeks ; for it He made 
us, and in it He rejoices ; for therein He attains the beatitude 
of the Father who loves to hear the voices of His children, to 
feel their small soft hands holding to His knees and clasping 
His feet. The God we worship loves to speak to us as men 
who fear lest they go astray, and daily pray that He may 
make the paths in which they cannot err straight for 
their feet. And we worship Him that we may be like Him, 
"perfect, as our Father in heaven is perfect." * 

* Matt. V. 48. 



II 

JESUS AND THE FOUNDING OF THE CHURCH 

'T^HE founding of what Jesus termed the kingdom 
-^ of God and we name the Christian reHgion begins 
with the calHng of the disciples. With them and their 
education His ministry was concerned, and not with the 
conversion of a nation or a multitude. The people and 
the religious parties supplied the environment amid which 
He did the things He performed, the local conditions which 
enabled Him to point His morals and to bring out His truth ; 
but His work, so far at least as represented by His life and 
teaching, was to construct a new environment for others 
than Himself, to elaborate a fresh personal and social ideal, 
and to form the men who were to realize it. If success be 
measured by the numbers attracted and influenced, — the 
work of Jesus must be described as a grotesque failure; but 
if by the degree or amount of power manifested, the quality 
of the men formed, the ends then and still sought and so 
far secured, — then we must judge His work to be of more 
splendid efficacy than anything ever attempted or achieved 
by any single person in history. 

I 

I. What sort of person Jesus was before the baptism 
and the preaching of John we do not certainly know, though 
we may infer. What we do know is that He suddenly 

283 



284 JESUS WHEN HE CAME AND WHEN HE DEPARTED. 

breaks silence and bursts into speech. Jesus "came into 
Galilee preaching the Gospel of God," * and called the 
fishermen to follow Him and be made into "fishers of 
men." f When He so came He was but a Jew, lowly born, 
humbly bred, a mere peasant without learning or culture, 
without the manners of the court or the spirit of the capital. 
He had become a preacher just as Amos the herdman of 
Tekoa had done;} or as David, who had been taken from 
the sheep folds "from following the ewes great with young," § 
and made a king. And like them, though His call was due to 
the direct action of God, yet He was despised and rejected by 
the official leaders of the people. Pascal 1 1 says : ' ' Jesus Christ 
lived in an obscurity, at least in what the world calls ob- 
scurity, so deep that the historians, who write only of the 
great affairs of state, hardly notice Him." If they had 
noticed, what would they have said ? Probably something 
like this : " In those days one Jesus of Nazareth, a carpenter, 
began to preach, and, after the manner of his kind, gathered 
round him certain ignorant fisher- folk; but all the people 
of repute held aloof. And when he became troublesome, 
the chief priest, by a stroke of most excellent diplomacy, 
had him captured and taken before the procurator, who soon 
made an end of the vain agitator." Happily eyes of truer 
and keener insight watched His coming, and so when He left 
us He 'had ceased to be a Jew, and become the Son of God, 
the Person who was to act upon Society as the recreative 
Truth, and the process by which He slowly penetrated the 
spirit of man. All God's great works are accomplished ih 
silence. They are not done amid the rattle of drums and 
the blare of trumpets. Light as it travels to the eye utters 



* Mark i. 14. f Mark i. 17 ; Matt. iv. 19, 

J Amos i. I. § Psalm xxviii. 70, 71. 

II Pensees, vol. ii, p. 325 (Ed. Faugere) ; iii. p. 227 (Ed. Brunschvigg). 



THE SILENT WORKS OF GOD 285 

no sound the ear can hear, and creation is a silent process. 
Nature rose under the Almighty hand without clang of 
hammers or clamour of crowds, or thunders that distract 
and disturb. And when Jesus came from God it was but 
fit that His coming should be lowly. The most common of 
all things is birth, though nothing is so strange and even 
wonderful as the child born ; but the most marvellous of all 
births is the birth of Him whom Herod hated, and Rome 
did not care to know. And as the child came, so came the 
King. His kingdom was founded by humble words and 
lowly deeds, by a life lived amid His own people, at the 
side of His own sea, and in His own province of Galilee. 
When His work was done, and He had to go home to the 
Father, He went as silently as He had come. And though 
His time was short. His day was like an eternal now which 
can never fade from the eye of man or be swallowed up in 
the darkness of his night. 

2. But our purpose is not to study the Primary Founder; 
but rather to study those who may be termed the 
secondary founders of our faith, persons without whom the 
religion could not have been. This distinction may seem 
indeed illusory, for the persons could only have become in- 
fluential through and because of the activity of Jesus. We 
cannot isolate the two, and in studying the men He formed 
what are we doing except studying a special mode of 
His formative action? What this means will appear as 
we proceed; but here the first involves a second distinc- 
tion. The secondary founders of the religion were of two 
classes, disciples and apostles The disciples were men 
of sympathetic minds, who responded to the spirit and 
teaching of Jesus; but the apostles were ''the twelve," so 
named not because they typified the tribes of Israel, but 
because they were selected expressly to be made into ''the 



286 THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN DISCIPLES AND APOSTLES. 

ministers of His word."* And how does one minister the 
word save by preaching ? The disciples may be described 
as those who had an inarticulate affinity of spirit with Him 
and His aims ; and who acted in obedience to a law which 
has reigned wherever man has had something to teach and 
men have felt anxious to learn. The disciples were, there- 
fore, as men conscious of their own ignorance, com- 
pelled to seek a Master. The apostles, on the contrary, 
were selected and separated from this class by Jesus' own 
act, who wanted not mere hearers, but companions and 
successors; for, as Mark puts it, "He called unto Him 
whom He Himself would," and ''He appointed twelve that 
they might be with Him, and that He might send them 
forth to preach." t This act was later and more con- 
scious than the other, which was indeed less an act than 
what we may call a process of elective affinity, in which 
both He and they cooperated. 

3. The method of education which Jesus followed may 
be described as threefold, by speech, by example, and by 
experience; or by what He said, by what He did, and by 
what He set them to do. He followed with disciples as well 
as with apostles this threefold method in the three periods 
into which His life naturally falls, and therefore with both 
the classes He attracted to His side. The first period is the 
opening of His public ministry, when He had around Him 
an indefinite number, now larger now smaller, of disciples. 
In this period His spirit was buoyant, cheerful, expectant, 
and breathed a serene and lucid hopefulness. He believed 
that truth, like God, is almighty; that where it leads man 
must follow; and that it has but to be known to be 
revered and loved and obeyed. But time brought dis- 

* Matt. X. 2-7; xix. 28; Mark iii. 14-19; Luke vi. 13; xxii. 30. 
t Mark iii. 13, 14, 



THE PERIODS OF THE MINISTRY AND THE DISTINCTION 287 

illusionment; He discovered that men were creatures com- 
pacted of many interests and strong passions, which pulled 
them in opposite directions, and did not always allow them 
to go whither their faces pointed ; and that it was possible 
to love controversy more than truth, and the quest after 
God more than the God the quest was pursued to find. 
And so the ministry which opened amid radiance, and with 
infinite promise, closed under tragedy and eclipse ; and the 
pathos of the contrast between the radiant hope and the 
tragic eclipse lies in the apostasy of the many who had 
wished and professed to be disciples; but who could not 
pay the price or make the renunciation required from the 
men who would "walk with Jesus." 

4. In the second period, which may be called the period 
of apostolic education, Jesus chooses from among the 
sympathetic but unstable disciples twelve men to be with 
Him and learn of Him, though here again He found 
that they were at once slow to believe what they did 
not wish to be true, and swift to credit what they 
desired, even if it were false. But where men are 
faithless He continues faithful, and here He had His 
reward. The apostles grow liker Him than they seem — 
the one apostasy which occurs amid the twelve only em- 
phasizes the otherwise universal obedience — their appre- 
hension of His truth grows, and though they often stumble, 
and almost as often fall, yet they begin to learn to walk 
alone, and trust where they cannot see. 

The first and second periods are mainly Galilean, and its 
conflict is with the Pharisees, who are stronger in the prov- 
inces than even in the capital. In the third period the 
scene changes, and the teaching with it ; Jerusalem takes the 
place of Galilee, the Sadducees become His antagonists, 
and the priests speak against Him rather than the scribes. 



288 THE MINISTRY DISTINGUISHED ACCORDING TO PLACE. 

This means that in Jerusalem Jesus finds the most significant 
thing for reUgion to be not the synagogue and the law, but 
the temple so far as it regulates worship and conduct ; and 
so He now speaks to the Sadducees concerning sacrifice and 
worship, and not, as in Galilee, to the Pharisees of obedi- 
ence and conduct. The Sadducees, who as priests were more 
jealous of Him and more fearful of Rome which they knew 
than the Pharisees who did not know it, plot and accom- 
plish His death. Its instrument is the cross, which thus 
becomes for the new religion a symbol of sacrifice, in 
room of the place of sacrifice in the temple which distin- 
guished the old faith. But His death turned their fancied 
triumph into absolute defeat, for it is in the right and 
by the power of His cross that Christ, in His turn the 
symbol of the pity and the mercy of God, has ruled the 
world. Amid these scenes the education of the twelve is 
completed, the wisdom of Jesus in selecting them justi- 
fied, and His sovereignty over man established. 



II 

I . In what we may name the discipular period, in distinc- 
tion from the second or apostolic, let us imagine the men 
who as disciples were drawn to Jesus and drew Him to 
them. He and they were a signal illustration of elective 
affinities. They had with Him and He with them a sym- 
pathy which made the process of unconscious selection 
easy as well as natural. Here, then, is our first question, 
and many have found that it both suggests and ex- 
presses an initial difficulty: Why were the disciples of 
Jesus drawn in the first instance from the poor, who were 
here also the unlettered ? Poverty was not in Israel, the in- 
variable associate of ignorance, though Jesus helped to make 



JESUS, THE UNLEARNED, ATTRACTS UNLEARNED MEN 289 

it this. Does it not seem, then, as if there was truth in the 
ancient charge that it was because of the affinity of His own 
untutored nature for the natures and the ideals of the un- 
educated ? He, as a man without learning, was attracted 
to the unlearned, and could not attract any of the learned 
either to Himself or to His cause. Now let us at once grant 
that there were educated classes in Israel, not necessarily 
moneyed men, but men qualified by culture to understand 
a real and genuine Messiah, and to enter with intelligence 
and enthusiasm into His aims and mind. Yet it is certain 
that Jesus neither drew such men nor was drawn to them. 
And it does not seem as if He had made any serious or 
sustained effort to attract them to His side. Why ? Was 
it for reasons in Him or in them ? Were the hindrances 
in His lack of culture or in the cultured classes themselves ? 
This, then, is the question we have to discuss. 

2. Our discussion starts, then, with the educated class of 
largest if not social yet political importance in Israel, viz. 
the priesthood. No priest became a disciple of Jesus; the 
priestly class as a whole, especially as represented by 
its responsible leaders, remained His irreconcilable enemies. 
This is a tragic fact; for the ideal of the priesthood was 
noble, if not indeed sublime; its temper had been fine 
and generous, though its traditions were regal and aristo- 
cratic. The priest in Israel filled the highest office possible 
to man. As thought fancied him, he was the mediator 
between man and God, with consequent responsibilities 
and correlative obligations, though he himself tended 
to forget both. As he looked towards man, he was 
like the visible image of God turned outward, with face 
and eyes so full of human pity, a heart so possessed 
of divine love, a conscience so instinct with eternal 
rectitude, that men would feel that in seeing him they 



290 THE PRIESTHOOD IN THE HISTORY OF ISRAEL 

saw God; and found Him to be a Being so awful yet 
SO attractive that the sinner, when he saw, ceased from 
his sinning, and the saint, who knew where the sinner 
could but see, lived as in the presence of the Eternal 
Purity. When the priest turned towards God he was 
meant to be as if he were collective Israel turned inward, 
or like man alone before God, with his incorporated sins 
and sorrows, penances and fears, prayers and praises, 
aspirations and hopes, making intercession with groan- 
ings which could not be uttered. 

3. And, in history, the reality had in a measure corre- 
sponded to the ideal. The priesthood in Israel had stood 
through centuries in a ceaseless succession before God. 
The oil that anointed Aaron had consecrated all his sons ; 
its fragrance had filled their generations. For the in- 
heritance of venerable traditions, the memory of an illus- 
trious past, the names of distinguished ancestors, and of 
heroic services to the people — all were theirs. Priests 
had crowned kings, and stood before them as counsellors 
and guides; they had suffered wasting and reproach with 
the people of God ; had gone with them and for them into 
exile ; together they had sat by the rivers of Babel, weep- 
ing as they remembered Zion. They had cheered the 
exiles with brave speech, high hopes, splendid pictures of 
their revived and rejuvenated race; and they had led the 
return to their ancient and holy but desolate home, 
where they had built a second temple, which seemed to 
the outward eye less glorious than Solomon's, though it 
was more glorious to the inward eye. For Solomon's 
spoke more of his own regal magnificence than of the 
majesty of God; but the temple which succeeded spoke 
of a faith that many waters could not quench; a piety 
that poverty could not extinguish; and a courage that, 



FORGETS ITS HISTORY AND HIGH VOCATION . 291 

out of the poverty and in the face of the oppressor, could 
build a home for the God who had chosen them out of all 
the families of the earth to be His people, and to be great 
through His name. And in days when the Gentiles were 
strong and the heathen ruled in the land, had not a priest 
proved himself more kingly than the king? and had not 
the Maccabaean name come to be feared beyond Israel, 
while loved within it as the symbol of heroic sagacity, 
strength, and patriotism? 

4. But in the days of Jesus the priesthood, forgetful 
of its high vocation, had descended into the arena 
where craft contended against power, and by intrigue, 
by diplomacy, by supple astuteness where it con- 
fronted strength, by arrogance where it faced humility, 
had attempted to balance itself amid hostile forces, and 
to stand secure between the might of the Roman Empire 
and the turbulent Jewish democracy. The distance be- 
tween Judas the Maccabaean and the adroit Caiaphas, or 
between Jonathan and Simon, the brothers of Judas and 
Annas, the high priest, with John and Alexander, and all 
his kindred — is greater than thought can measure. 
Enough to say, we could not conceive Caiaphas playing 
the part of the Maccabaean men, or the Maccabaean man 
giving to contemporary Israel a counsel like his, to sur- 
render, say, to Antiochus Epiphanes the most blameless 
person they knew, in order that they themselves might be 
spared. It is small wonder that men who were, amid the 
collision of hostile political forces, so intent on maintain- 
ing their unstable equiUbrium, should not know the 
Christ when He came, but should see in Him only One 
who endangered their office and threatened to overthrow 
their power. And so we are not surprised that Jesus was 
not drawn to any priest nor drew any priest to Himself. 



292 INCAPACITY OF PRIESTHOOD FOR APOSTLESHIP. 

On the contrary, we should have been astonished if He had 
found among the men who had, by being false to their 
own high vocation, become false through and through. 
For how could men vacant of good have affinities with 
Him so strong as to justify adoption into the band of His 
disciples ? 

5 . But this defines only one side of the priestly incapacity ; 
on another side the incapacity was still more inveterate. 
There is nothing that may be more accurately described 
as the man himself than the nature which is his both by in- 
heritance and education. And the priesthood in Israel was 
at once hereditary and disciplined ; it was an aristocracy 
both of blood and of office ; its men were born to be priests, 
and what their birth made them they were trained to be. 
Now it is easier to change the skin of an Ethiopian than the 
soul of a man ; and even in the renewed soul the old nature 
will out. And this means here that it is less difficult for 
the man born a priest to change his religion than to forget 
his priesthood. But in the kingdom which Jesus founded 
there were to be no priests ; His religion was to be personal 
and ethical, not ceremonial and sacerdotal. He studiously 
avoided whatever looked towards the celebrations w^hich 
the priest loves, and which so readily become to him the 
centre and substance of worship. Jesus followed no ritual, 
presented no sacrifice, did not frequent the temple, asked 
help of no priest, nor regarded one as needful for man's 
approach to God or God's approach to man. It was thus 
in entire consonance with His ideas that He invited no 
priest to become a disciple; and there is nothing more 
significant of His attitude of mind and the purpose that 
governed Him. For the man who conceived God to be 
jealous about the descent of the men who approached Him ; 
about the forms they used, the altars they stood at, and 



THE PHARISEES AS A CULTIVATED CLASS 293 

how they stood at the altars ; about the beasts they touched 
or slew, the blood they sprinkled and how they did the 
sprinkling, — were men distasteful to Jesus. They held an 
idea of religion which rested on a conception of God that 
must have seemed mean and unworthy to Him whose soul 
lived in the Father and His love. And so He and they 
stood too far apart ever to meet. The birth and culture 
the priest had built round him was like a bulwark which 
Jesus could neither climb nor pierce; while the official 
minister of worship, the creation of the Levitical law, 
could not understand Christ's spirit of grace and truth. 

HI 

1 . But the Scribes and Pharisees constituted a second cul- 
tivated class, who may here be termed the men of tradition 
and the law, or the Book and its interpretation. The Phari- 
see did not, like the priest, base his claims on birth and blood, 
but on school and learning. He was not so sectional and 
aristocratic, but more national and democratic than the 
Sadducee. He might be poor, a humble trader or craftsman, 
for his fame did not rest on his worldly circumstances or 
success, but on his knowledge of the Fathers, on "the 
traditions of the elders," on the law, written or oral. The 
centre of his interest was the school and the synagogue, 
not the temple; he believed more in the Messiah and the 
hope of Israel than in the priest and his worship; the 
object of his veneration was the Book and not the altar. 

2. Yet the Pharisees could boast a long and honourable 
history ; they had built themselves an everlasting monument 
in the faith arid literature and learning of Israel. They 
had gathered scholars in their schools, and by their preaching 
in the synagogue had instructed the people in the Ancient 



294 THE BIBLE A CREATION OF PHARISAIC 

Law. They had collected the sacred books, had woven 
into a connected and ordered history the older narratives, 
had preserved the fugitive psalms, the prophetic broad- 
sides, the rhapsodies of nameless poets, and the reflections 
of unknown thinkers. These fragments they had piously 
pieced together, and had formed the canon of the Old 
Testament which Christianity knows, and we have in- 
herited. We hold the wondrous Book in the deepest 
reverence, we study its history, are enlightened by its 
wisdom, uplifted by its poetry, informed, guided, cast down, 
strengthened by its prophecy ; and we are duly grateful to 
the God who gave it and to the men through whom it 
came. The Bible is at once a library and a literature. It 
seems to us a single Book, yet it belongs to many ages, has 
a multitude of authors, and is the joint product of all the 
literary classes and all the literary men of an ancient people 
whose historical life is to be counted by centuries. And 
have not the scribes who created the marvellous literary 
unity we think of as our Bible a singular claim on our 
regard and even on our reverence? They had lived for 
the Word of God, had loved it, and had tried to keep it 
living by applying it to the daily life of their State and 
people. But now comes the tragedy which lies in all great 
deeds ; the men grew to think of the Book as if they owned 
it, and as if it were a body of rules which they and their 
fathers had framed and enacted and ought to enforce, 
whether upon man or God ; nor could they conceive any 
way to be His way save the law which they had 
established. And this law as of God could not be re- 
laxed even in His favour whose law it was; it bound 
Him as well as man; He could not be permitted to 
be better or to do more or other than the law said. 
And so they could not think of Jesus as bringing a larger 



ACTIVITY, USED TO LIMIT GOD 295 

and richer notion of God than either they or their fathers 
had known. They interpreted them as they interpreted 
Christ, through their rigorous statutes, and would not allow 
Him, unrebuked, to heal a cripple on the Sabbath,* or to 
say to a paralytic, who was also a penitent, ''Thy sins are 
forgiven thee,"t or to show His Messiahship by knowing 
no class save the men who needed to be saved. If 
He sought, by revealing His own kinship and feeling, 
to save the men, the Pharisees, who saw only the 
outside, whether of cup or platter, sepulchre or man, law 
or worship, never perceived the publican changed, or knew 
Him who changed him, and could only say, '' Behold a man, 
gluttonous and a winebibber, the friend of publicans and 
sinners!" J 

3. But our point may be illustrated by a most character- 
istic incident which Luke § tells. A Pharisee had been 
liberal enough to invite Jesus to eat with him. As the 
guests sat at meat in the rich man's house, the door, being- 
open, in the Oriental fashion, the voices not only filled the 
room where they were sitting, but wandered out into the 
street. In the crowd that gathered was "a woman in the 
city, a sinner" whose heart the Lord had touched. Over 
her His voice threw its mystic spell, and drew her in, where 
she could better hear His gracious words. Behind Him, 
as he reclined, stretched His unsandalled feet, down her 
shoulders fell her untended hair, once her chief adornment 
and pride, now in the rush of the new penitence forgotten 
and neglected. As she strained forward to catch His gentle 
speech a tear stole down her cheek, and fell upon His naked 
feet. She started to see it there, for she felt as if the tears 

* Matt. xii. 9-13; Mark iii. 1-5; Luke vi. 6-11. 
t Mark ii. 3-12 ; Matt. ix. 2-8. 
J Matt. xi. 16-19; Luke vii. 31-5; xv. i, 2. 
§ vii. 36-50. 



296 

shed by her sinful eyes would stain His unstained feet, and 
so she seized one of her sumptuous but forlorn locks to 
wipe her guilty tear from His sinless foot. But the Pharisee, 
who saw only the outward act, and neither the love in the 
Saviour nor the gratitude in the woman that prompted the 
deed, could only straighten and stiffen himself, and say: 
''This man, who so loves the sinner, must also love the sin 
she stands for; this woman, who so loves the man, proves 
Him to be as sinful as she; neither, therefore, is in place 
in my house." But Jesus answered Simon's unuttered 
thought by a parable which he was too shallow and impure 
to understand ; and He pointed its moral by a saying which 
Simon could not comprehend. ' ' Her sins, which are many, 
are forgiven, for she loved much." Where love is, it 
speaks a language intelligible to those who love ; where love 
is not, its highest wisdom will appear to the loveless base 
passion or merest folly. How, then, could men so incapable 
of being just to the pity of God or the grace of Heaven, 
learn of Jesus? They could find no promise in Him, nor 
He any prophecy of possible culture in them. And so 
neither desired the other; the one could not be the Master 
nor the others be disciples. He turned to call the publican 
and sinner to repentance. But the Scribes and Pharisees 
looked and thought and lived as men who had no need to 
repent. 



IV 

I. Jesus, then, did not seek in Jerusalem and its temple, 
or among the scribes and their synagogues, for the men He 
needed. A disciple was a man who could learn of Him, 
who was no superior person, though he had a superior 
nature, not indeed as yet cultivated, only capable of 



THE SORT OF MEN ATTRACTED TO JESUS 297 

cultivation. The main matter was the quality not of the 
culture, but of the nature, for on the nature the kind and 
the quality of the culture will depend. Now, it was beside 
the inland sea of His own province that He found natures 
of a quality that could bear and repay cultivation at His 
hands. There in the eventide we might have seen the 
men launching their boats and faring forth upon the 
waters, or at night out on the lake, under the lustrous 
Syrian stars, or labouring at the oar and casting their nets 
into the sea, often to draw them in almost or even alto- 
gether empty. And, as the daylight broke and life in the 
villages began to stir, we might have seen the hardy fisher- 
men, soiled and rough from their labours, come bearing 
the harvest, white and silvery and beautiful, they had 
reaped from the bosom of the lake to sell for food to men. 
Then by day we might have seen them, with their boats 
drawn up on the beach, sitting in their shadow mending 
their nets; while within the women kept household, and 
about the children played. There Jesus came, and there 
He found the men who had the possibilities of His dis- 
ciples, and who could be made into "fishers of men." 

2. And they were men who had within them a whole in- 
articulate world passionate for birth, ideals they could not 
utter or even comprehend. We can all feel the pathos of 
the dumb multitude, who have never known the splendid 
moment when a long enforced silence breaks into trium- 
phant speech. Song is but the j ubilant utterance of a nature 
which could not otherwise express the thoughts that arise 
within it ; and art may follow after, though she can never 
overtake the nature that then learns to sing. Jesus had 
listened to the mute music within the men, and He gave 
them the voice they had been all through the silent centuries 
struggling to find. He saw in them, though they could 



298 THE NAMELESS MEN DRAWN TO JESUS. 

boast no famed ancestors and no glorious past, the promise 
of a fruitful future. They had upon them the infinite 
pathos of the nameless. From time immemorial their 
children had stolen out of eternity into time; and while 
the son had known his father, and probably his grandfather 
— perhaps in rare cases may even have seen or heard of his 
grandfather's father — yet beyond this point stretched the 
innumerable multitude of the nameless, the long receding 
line of the unknown. To the men who have had no 
past what promise can the future make, save that it must 
be as the past has been? The peasant may be known to 
his son and even to his son's son, but oblivion then over- 
takes him, eternity swallows him up; and he becomes a 
forgotten link in the generations, one moment known as a 
man, then unknown for ever. There amid the nameless, 
with all their possibilities lying ingloriously dumb within 
them, the Master found the men He needed, and called 
them to be His disciples. 

3. It may frankly be said that the men were incapable of 
the culture of the school, and did not even try to acquire it. 
The scholar imitates classical models, and speaks in the 
language of letters and learning ; the schoolman copies his 
pedagogue, and uses the'tongue of his sect or his set. But the 
secondary founders of our faith never tried to become scholars 
or pedagogues or men of letters; they were and remained 
provincials, unmoved by the ambition to speak the tongue of 
Greece in the Athenian way, to understand either the law 
or the imperial politics and personalities of Rome. They 
were simply men who believed that the greatest thing in 
time was religion ; that the highest Being man could know 
was God; and that the wisest thing he could do was to 
learn of him who knew most of God and could best teach 
His truth. And so they were as docile and ductile as 



ALL DISCIPLES, NONE APOSTLES 299 

children, though they could also be as obstinate. They 
were passionate and petulant, frank but slow of speech, 
quick in action but sluggish in reason, swift to ask, with 
the simplicity of a child, questions that puzzle a man, 
impatient to get yet easily pleased with an answer. They 
were readily provoked yet not difficult to appease, unim- 
pressed by the ideal, though struck by the exceptional 
which appealed to their wonder or their senses ; they had 
a native incoherence of mind, yet were unsophisticated, 
transparent, honest as the day, with the hunger of spirit 
which craved for the realities hidden by the conventions 
of the time. Who they were we know but in part; to 
name and enumerate them all were indeed impossible. 
The apostles were all disciples, but not all the disciples 
were or became apostles. Four classes may be distin- 
guished: (a) those who were chosen to form the twelve, 
to be the constant and intimate companions of the Master; 
(/3) the faithful, like the women who followed Him to the 
cross and could not forget Him as He lay in the tomb; 
(7) the multitudes of the like-minded who loved to hear 
the ''gracious words that proceeded out of His mouth"; 
(B) the occasional hearers, men who sympathized with 
Him, who loved Him, but who so loved the world that 
they feared to make the great renunciation He demanded. 
The disciples must, indeed, have been a mixed multitude. 
We may wish to know more of Martha and Mary and their 
brother Lazarus;* of the seventy who "returned with 
joy," saying, "Lord, even the devils are subject to us in 
Thy name"; t of the Samaritan leper who alone of the 
ten who were healed turned back to thank Jesus and to 
glorify God; J of the young man who followed Jesus as 

* Luke X. 38-42; John xi. 5. f Luke x. 17. 

J Ibid., xvii. 12-17. 



300 THE APOSTLES TYPES OF THE DISCIPLES. 

they took Him from Gethsemane to the house of the high 
priest, and who "fled naked," leaving the linen cloth he 
had cast about him in his would-be captors' hands,* and 
of many more besides; but our wish is vain. All we can 
do is to think of the unknown in terms of the known. 
The men we know best are those who have apostolic names. 
They are all Galileans save one, Judas, the man from 
Kerioth, "which also betrayed Him." f He is a tragic 
figure, a Satan among those sons of God, possibly be- 
coming a disciple in a fit of transient enthusiasm and 
admiration, discovering his awful mistake when it was 
too late, bearing the conflict between his actual mind and 
his ideal of Jesus till he could bear it no longer, and he 
"betrays his Master with a kiss." Two have Greek names, 
Andrew and Philip, t and they are the two who bring the 
Greeks to Jesus. § The others have all Aramaic or Hebrew 
names, 1 1 even Simon Bar- Jonah, receiving from the Master 
another and more characteristic name in the same tongue, 
Cephas, which later interpreters translated into the Greek 
Peter. But though the men agreed in descent, they differed 
in character. Some were like Levi or Matthew, the publican, 
who farmed the taxes which the Roman levied and was 
hated of all honest Jews, partly because of his profession 
and partly because of his subservience to the hated alien ; 
and some were like Simon, who is described by Matthew 
and Mark as "the Cananaean," which is translated by Luke 
into ZrjXcoTrj^: ^ Simon, the Zealot, a member of a fanatical 
sect which despised the Roman, hated his taxes and re- 
garded the publican as the Jewish instrument of his rapacity, 

* Mark xiv. 51, 52. 

t Matt. X. 4; xxvi. 25; xxvii. 31; Mark iii. 19; Luke vi. 16; xxii. 3, 48. 

J Mark iii. 18. 

§ John xii. 20-22. || Matt. x. 2-4; Mark iii, 16-19. 

^ Matt. X. 4; Mark iii. 18; Luke vi. 15; Acts i. 13. 



PETER AS EXAMPLE OF A DISCIPLE . 3OI 

with a passion fiercely blended of contempt and scorn. 
But the majority were fishermen, who at the call of Jesus 
** forsook their nets and followed Him." 



If we would more intimately know what manner of men 
the disciples were, let us study the two, Peter and John, 
who became most eminent as apostles, as they were when 
Jesus found them. 

I. Peter comes to us straight from his nets, brawny 
and bronzed, with the smell of fish in his garment, 
and the light of the sea in his eyes, a child of nature, 
though of nature as Galilee knew it and as the Old 
Testament had made it. He knows the lake where he 
plies his craft, the currents that shoot through its bosom, 
and the banks where fish like to feed and breed and swim. 
He has by long watching become familiar with the seasons 
and the changes they effect in the air and the sea; with 
the moon and the stars which help him to steer his course 
by night and to know where he is, in spite of the shifting 
winds and the drifting clouds. But of what Hes outside 
Galilee and beyond its lake he knows little. Jerusalem he 
has heard of and may even have visited; but Rome he 
does not know; with Athens he is quite unacquainted 
and can tell nothing of " its potent schools. He has the 
narrow horizon and swift emotions, the limited but intense 
beliefs, of the fisherman. He is at once ignorant and 
arrogant, and thinks that by shaping the men he knows 
according to his own ideas he could make a happy society. 
He has the fine confidence in himself which enables him 
to assume the leadership of his companions and to speak for 
them; but when this self-confidence fails it fails utterly, 



302 THE PETER JESUS LEFT. 

and he falls straightway into the deepest despair. Hence 
he now abases himself before Jesus as " a sinful man,"* 
and then he tells Him what He ought and what He ought 
not to do, and what all men say of Him f thinking within 
himself and saying even to his friends things that speak 
of defeat or disaster.} He will not allow the Lord to wash 
his feet till he understands the symbolism of the act; 
then he would be wholly washed that he might be wholly 
cleansed.! He refuses to desert Him from whom he has 
learned the words of "eternal Hfe," || and he has the 
courage in the face of an armed multitude to smite the 
servant of the chief priest. Tf But in spite of his own proud 
boast,** he so winces at the sneer of a Jewish maid as to 
forswear his Master .ff The man has a manhood unspoiled 
and unformed; he is inchoate and forward, free of speech, 
swift to judge or misjudge, with a nature liable to gusts 
as sudden and violent as those that swept down upon the 
face of his lake and lashed it into storm. This is all we 
can say Peter was when Jesus found him. 

2. John, in the gospel which bears his name, appears 
as a more completely idealized man, distinguished as the 
specially ''beloved disciple." We imagine him less toil- 
worn than Peter, with radiant face and unfurrowed brow, 
and something of a woman's grace in the lithe and boyish 
beauty of his figure, the sort of lad after whom a matron 
would look, admiration mingling with affection in her eyes, 
and say: "Blessed is the mother that bare thee." But, 
if we qualify the picture of John in the Fourth Gospel by 
traits drawn from the Synoptists, we may see the man as 

* Luke V. 8. t Mark viii. 29; Luke ix. 20; Matt. xvi. 16. 

J Matt. xvi. 22. § John xiii. 6-10. 1| Ibid., vi. 68, 

f Matt. xxvi. 51, 
** Matt. xxvi. 35 ; Mark xiv. 31. 
tt Matt. xxvi. 69-7^; Mark xiv. 66-72; Luke xxii. 56-62. 



JOHN AS FOUND" AND LEFT 303 

he really was when called to be an apostle. He has a hot 
and vindictive temper, such as we expect in a nature un- 
curbed and uncalmed, for when an inhospitable Samaritan 
village refused to receive Jesus because His face was set 
as though He would go to Jerusalem, John, oblivious of 
all in the conduct of the Jew that justified Samaritan dis- 
like, asked that he should be allowed to command '' fire 
to descend from heaven and consume them." * His temper 
had all the jealous intolerance of the ignorant who regard 
good done in a way, and by men they do not approve, as 
no better than evil, and so when he saw a man he did not 
know as a disciple casting out devils in the name of Jesus 
he forbade him. The man did not *' follow with us," so 
had no right to know our truth or to use Christ's name. 
So John thought, and, expressing his thought, gave Jesus 
the opportunity to teach him the much-needed lesson: 
''He that is not against you is for you." f But John was 
then as vain as he was ignorant, and as ambitious as he was 
vain, and so he was blind both to his own frailties and to the 
majesty of the Redeemer, whose throne he and his brother 
thought they could climb to and were worthy to share . And 
he had not only the large ambitions of ignorant vanity, but 
he knew so little of what the passion and the death signified 
that when asked, as a condition of the favour he sought 
being granted, whether he could drink the Saviour's cup 
and be baptized with His baptism, he replied ''he was 
able. ' ' J Nothing could have caused more suffering to Jesus 
than a reply of this sort from a man like John, whose 
words here were more presumptuous than anything re- 
corded of Peter. But there is a point where folly becomes 
too impertinent to wound the wise. 

* Luke ix. 54. f Luke ix. 49, 50 ; Mark ix. 38-40. 

J Matt. XX. 20-28 ; Mark x. 35-41. 



304 MEN JESUS CHOSE WERE ENTHUSIASTS. 

3. These, then, are types of the men Jesus called and 
out of such stuff — the class of the neglected, if not the 
castaway — He made at once the founders and the founda- 
tion of His church. It is enough that the fact be here 
indicated, where it is impossible to emphasize its signifi- 
cance. But if he who makes a blade of grass to grow where 
none grew before, is a benefactor of his kind, what can be 
said of Him who makes not only good citizens out of neg- 
lected men, but turns them into potent and efficient 
servants of the race? One thing may here be noted, 
for it denotes a danger avoided as well as a feat achieved. 
Men say " the common people are prone to fanaticism"; 
for they admire and cultivate the intense passion for small 
things which we call by that unkindly name. But the 
disciples were enthusiasts rather than fanatics, possessed 
and inspired of God, not mere zealots of the fane, the place 
where and the forms in which men think He can alone 
be worshipped. Fanaticism is zeal for trifles; enthusiasm 
is zeal for things that matter. Fanaticism is external 
devotion to a ceremony or rite, things that may flourish 
unnoticed and die when observed ; but enthusiasm is ethical 
and spiritual, the concentration of the soul on what pro- 
motes human happiness . Fanaticism guards the ornaments 
of the altar, the raiment that makes a man a wonder before 
and picturesque behind ; but enthusiasm thinks of Him in 
whose honour the altar is built, and seeks to create within 
the actual man one inner and ideal. Fanaticism watches 
the city and keeps it sacred; enthusiasm is not inspired 
by place, but by religion which it loves, for the beatitude 
it promises. The priests at Jerusalem were, alike in what 
they loved and in what they hated, fanatics ; but the 
Galilean men they despised were, as inspired to philanthropy 
by the beneficence of God, enthusiasts. Hence the 



FANATICISM AS FURY FOR THE FANE 305 

priests had the fury of the sectary for the temple, its 
ministers and its services; the apostles had the passion 
which is best described as the enthusiasm for humanity, 
for it burns to translate the grace of God into the good of 
man. Fanaticism is parsimonious, and will not part with 
what seems the very secret of its strength ; but enthusiasm 
is distributive, for it lives by spending what it holds most 
dear. 

Jesus, then, created out of common men the apostolical 
enthusiasts whom He laid as the basis of His church, and 
who were willing either to live or to die for man ; but those 
He neither could nor did form were the fanatics who lost 
the city they would have died to save, and, indeed, who 
died in the attempt to save it. 



Ill 

THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH 



I. ^ITE are concerned at present with the accidents 
* * and antitheses of the teaching of Jesus, or 
the inter-relations between Christ and the men He called. 
We assume that He appears not as priest, but as 
prophet, as a new rabbi in Israel ; a great man, raised up 
of God to teach the people.* We attempt no minute 
and exhaustive analysis of the instruction He gave. What 
we need to do is but to hear as the disciples heard, with 
the local colour restored and Jesus living beforie our eyes 
as He lived before theirs, embodying in character and 
conduct the ideal His teaching articulated. For the tone 
and colour of the teaching are local, determined by the prov- 
ince where it was spoken. What it preserves is not so much 
the ethics of Jesus as His antithesis to the Judaism of His 
day. The Judaism of Galilee was more national and less 
individual than the Judaism of the dispersion ; more an ideal 
which was less in touch with reality than the Judaism of 
Jerusalem . The J udaism He confronted was more Pharisaic 
than Sadducean, had its seat in the synagogue and the 
school rather than the temple; its representatives were 
not the priests, but the scribes of the Pharisees. Now their 
Judaism was marked by the intensity of its Messianic hope, 

* John iii. 2; i. 38-49; xx. 16; Matt, xxiii. 7, 8. 
306 



THE PHARISAIC NOTION OF THE LAW 



307 



or its belief in the kingdom of heaven; its passion for 
separation ; its faith that the kingdom could only be realized 
under the forms and within the limits of Judaism; its con- 
viction that the law, which was conceived as of perpetual 
obligation, must be maintained in its severe purity, and 
enforced in its completest integrity. And their law was not 
so much sacerdotal and sacrificial as moral and ceremonial, 
was more concerned with the regulation of conduct than 
with an institution or method of worship, less Levitical 
than Mosaic. 

2. This was essentially the Pharisaic notion of the law; 
and though all the scribes were not Pharisees, it was 
their notion also. They were, therefore, not so much 
moralists as jurists; their religion was a system of 
jurisprudence, or a legal and civil institution, rather than 
the relation of a moral man to a moral Deity. Their 
state was more a creation of positive legislation than a 
society of men freely associated for the better ordering 
of the collective and the individual life. To this system 
two things were necessary: (a) the synagogue where men 
met to do God honour by hearing the law they were bound to 
obey, read ; and (/3) the school where the scribe interpreted 
the law which he enforced and enlarged by his interpreta- 
tions. To the law Galilee offered a free and fair field ; for in 
Galilee the priesthood had hardly any foothold ; neither they 
nor their Levitical law could flourish apart from the temple, 
which was their home. In Galilee, too, the Jews were not, 
as in the Greek or Roman cities, a small and feeble colony 
who might cherish but could not hope to realize their racial 
ideals. The population was mixed, but the Jew was a 
genuine dweller in the land and no mere stranger. This 
Pharisaic system, then, Jesus opposed, not as a theory of 
ethics, but as a religion which had tried to become tribal — 



3o8 JESUS CREATES INITIAL CONDITION OF DISCIPLESHIP. 

but could not succeed in becoming what it wanted to 
be — and He opposed it by setting over against the tribal 
Deity and His outward service a God who was the universal 
Father, and an obedience which was the inward service of 
all He loved. 



II 

1. The earlier teaching of Jesus is addressed to men in 
whom His preaching had created the initial condition of 
discipleship — faith, and the hope which is at once remote 
from doubt and akin to it; remote inasmuch as it ex- 
pects to find, akin inasmuch as it fears that what it desires 
may prove illusory. What we have, then, in the so-called 
Sermon on the Mount is not a discourse inaugurative of the 
ministry, nor a programme of the religion, but a series of 
answers to unuttered interrogations. Jesus had preached 
''the Gospel of the kingdom," and "the kingdom" is what 
He seeks to explain, though under forms suggested by the 
questions which troubled the most sympathetic minds. 

2 . Jesus speaks, then, as a teacher to the simple but puzzled 
men who hear on the hillside, under the pure and open 
heaven and above the changeful, yet restful lake. What 
He says breathes the freshness of the spring morning, and, 
like it, is full of the fragrance of flowers and the songs of 
birds ; while His words have the same open richness which 
Nature, in the hour of her awakening, wears to the soul 
which has just stolen out of the arms of blissful sleep. 
On His spirit there lay as yet no shadow of the cross; 
only a radiant brightness, which was all the more beautiful 
that it seemed subdued by the sorrow born of fellow- 
ship with man. Around lay the world of men, great, 
active, absorbed in political dreams and large ambitions. 



THE WORLD AROUND JESUS AND HIS DISCIPLES 309 

Away up at Jerusalem the priests were celebrating in 
Stately attire — amid chant, and song, and incense — the 
sacrifices which they thought guarded the approaches to 
God, and distributed His beneficences among men. Up 
there, too, as well as in many a provincial city, the scribes 
in their synagogues read and expounded ''the Law." In 
Athens philosophers, seeking some new thing, waited for 
every stranger who came that they might question him; 
while they dreamed that the wisdom of the Greek race 
was the wisdom the world most needed for its higher 
life. In Corinth, in Alexandria, or in Antioch, rich mer- 
chants speculated on the Exchange, basing their specula- 
tions on the hunger of Rome, or the room for grain in the 
ships carrying it, and on how such ships could be sent emptier 
than the hungry people demanded, in order that prices 
might be enhanced. In the Rome on whose hunger they 
thus speculated Caesar dwelt in his palace or drove in the 
amphitheatre, or listened to the foolish and gay, while 
he fancied that the world had in him the only master it 
needed. Unmindful of all these persons and places, with 
all their questions and wants, Jesus, still clothed as a 
peasant, addressed His simple folk in simple speech ; yet with 
the dignity that came from nature and that owed nothing 
to art. The wisdom of His years of silence is seen in the 
maturity of His earliest recorded words, which are those 
not of a pupil who has much to learn, but of a master 
who has come to teach. And the men who sat round Him 
listening, whose clothes still held the fragrance of the sea 
or the soil, whose eyes burned with the fanaticism of the 
zealot, or whose faces were seamed with lines of greed and 
fear written by the weary years of keeping ravening hunger 
from the door — heard, perhaps without fully comprehending 
that what they heard were the first principles of a new 



3IO GALILEE AS A SCHOOLHOUSE. 

religion. The scene could hardly have been lowlier; 
though there were men who may have had the vision of a 
vaster mountain rising out of a sultry desert, whose peaks 
the thunders had smitten and the lightnings had touched as 
with smoke of fire. But the inner must have impressed 
them even more than the outer differences. Here there 
was neither earthquake nor tempest, but in the beautiful 
springtime, amid the bursting flowers, with the radiant 
heaven above and the smiHng lake below, the gracious lips 
of the Master dropped a wisdom which, as both pure and 
peaceable, was destined to become the law-book of a higher, 
a wider, and a more universal religion. 

3. There is another point that we must note: the arena 
He chose as His schoolhouse; it was the busy and popu- 
lous, though rustic and backward, province of Galilee. He 
avoided the capital, which a self-conscious teacher who 
wanted to build a new religion on the ancient substructures 
of Judaism would have instinctively selected. It was, though 
not the cradle, yet the seat and centre of His race and its 
worship. There was the temple with its priesthood, its 
ornate and venerated ritual, adorned and endeared by the 
traditions which for centuries had clustered round it. Jeru- 
salem was even then a city loved by the pilgrim. Poets 
had praised it as beautiful for situation and the joy of the 
whole earth; Mount Zion was the city of the great King, 
a city whose wealth and wisdom, whose glory and majesty, 
seemed to the imagination of her sons to realize the dreams 
of the golden age. There the people of God had been 
besieged by the heathen, and had been delivered by the 
outstretched hand of the Most High . The sublime prophet 
of the exile had broken into immortal poetry in praise of 
the city where God dwelt, towards which all nations were 
to look and within which they were to gather. Athens, 



EDUCATION or DISCIPLES IMPOSSIBLE IN JERUSALEM 311 

illustrious in wisdom, might be named the eye of Greece; 
Rome might be then the synonym of imperial, political, 
and secular power, as it was to be to later men the seat of 
ecclesiastical authority; Mecca may speak to us of a 
prophet that conquered by the sword, though he reigns 
by the might of the word he uttered; while Benares 
is eloquent of a religion of caste which rules as with a 
rod of iron the millions of a race we think we govern. 
But Jerusalem, as the creation and home of the religion of 
the one God, is a city dear to all who love Him. What 
place, then, so fit for the ministry which Jesus contem- 
plated ? There He would have found the fit soil for His 
seed, rabbis to listen to Him, scribes to report Him, priests 
to hold Him up. 

But though Jesus had the Jews' love for the city 
and knew that a prophet could not perish out of 
Jerusalem; yet He also saw how impossible it would 
be to educate His disciples there. The strife of sects 
would have marred the serenity of His own soul, and 
have proved still more fatal to the tractability of the 
men He wanted to teach. Nature is easily made abor- 
tive; man thrives best in silence. Where controversy 
rages, discipline may fail to subdue; curiosity may be fed, 
but reason is starved. What distracts the mind will pre- 
vent its culture. And so Jesus wished that the simple men 
He had called should not, in the process and period of 
pupilage, be perplexed by the confusion or maddened by 
the diversity of the tongues spoken by a multitude of 
minds. Hence He chose for His schoolroom a seclusion 
where meditation and growth were possible, where He an\i 
His disciples could stand face to face, look with untroubled 
eyes upon the truth, and feel God to be both near and real. 
He was soon, indeed, to discover that even where the 



312 USE OF THE SYNAGOGUE GRANTED TO JESUS 

lean streets and grimy walls of a city did not shut Him in, 
the dissonant voices of men could make themselves heard. 
But in Galilee the towns were villages, the fields were broad, 
the lake was open and free. Here He could stand between 
His disciples and the men who would have troubled them, 
keeping their souls open to God and speaking to them con- 
cerning '' the kingdom." 

HI 

But, now, let us see whether we can find in the Men 
Jesus educated and in His discourses any trace of His own 
prior history and personal experiences which had been their 
occasion. 

I. In the first part of the Gospels we learn that 
Jesus had been allowed, in accordance with the common 
practice,* to use the synagogues. Mark f is on this point 
as emphatic as Matthew. J They agree that His ministry 
began in the synagogue, and both specify individual in- 
stances, as at Capernaum,! and in His own country, 1 1 
where the people ask, Since He is but a carpenter and 
a carpenter's son, whence His wisdom ? Luke, who agrees 
here with the other Synoptics, represents Jesus as teaching 
in the synagogues of Galilee; but he adds a new element 
which throws light upon His upbringing and the 
habits in which he was trained at Nazareth, when 
he says that He entered, **as His custom was," into the 

* Cf. John xviii. 20; Acts ix. 20; xiii. 5, 14-16; xiv. i ; xvii. i, 2, 17, 
xviii. 4, 26; xix. 8. 

f Marki. 21, 29, 39. 

X Matt. iv. 23 ; cf. ix. 35, where the statement is repeated. What we 
seek is what shall explain both the form and the matter of the earlier 
teaching. 

§ Mark ii. i ; cf . Matt. viii. 5-6 ; xii. 9. 

II Mark vi. 2 ; cf. Matt, xiii. 54. 



ACCORDING TO THE CUSTOM OF ISRAEL 313 

synagogue on the Sabbath day, and stood up to read.* 
But His free and unconventional speech soon brought 
trouble. At Nazareth the people in the synagogue, when 
they heard, "were all filled with wrath." f "They 
were astonished at His teaching; for He taught them as 
having authority, and not as the scribes. "J This com- 
parison was not felt to be quite pleasant; the people asked, 
"What is this new teaching?" § and the scribes watched 
how they might entangle Him in His talk.|| They further 
plotted how they might destroy Him, for, as Luke says, 
"they were filled with madness, and communed one with 
another what they might do to Jesus." 1[ (a) Now criticism 
easily becomes judgment, and we know that the synagogues 
could both judge and punish a man, ** their right to do so, 
especially in religious matters, being expressly recognized 
by the imperial law. ft Exclusion from the synagogue was 
therefore equal to excommunication; and Jesus, shut out 
from the places where He had been wont to teach, learned 
to regard them as seats of suffering and symbols of injustice. 
(^) John tells us that fear of the Pharisees kept many 
of the rulers from confessing their faith, "lest they should 
be put out of the synagogue," J J and Jesus warns His 
disciples that they will be "scourged in "the synagogues," §§ 

* Luke iv. 15-16, 44; vi. 6. f Luke iv. 28. 

+ Mark i. 22. Matthew places almost identical words in the mouth of 
the multitudes who had listened to the " sermon on the mount," vii. 2. 
§ Mark i. 27; xi. 18 ; Luke xix. 47. || Matt. xxii. 15. 

^ vi. II. cf. Matt. xii. 9; Mark iii. 1-6. 
** Acts ix. 2; xxii. 19; xxvi. 11. 

tf Hence the attitude of Gallic (Acts xviii. 12-17), and the scourging 
of Paul, though a Roman citizen (2 Cor. xi. 24). The distinction familiar 
and frequent in Roman law between a legal and illegal religion and its 
bearing upon persecution is well stated and illustrated by Neander, Church 
History, i. 19-128 (Bohn's ed.). 

XX John xii. 42; cf. ix. 22, xvi. 2. 

§§ Matt. X. 17; xxiii. 34; Mark xiii. 9; Luke xxi. 12. 



314 ^ET NATURE BETTER THAN THE SYNAGOGUE. 

and bids them beware of the men who love there to occupy 
"the chief seats,"* and not to be anxious as to how or 
what they shall answer the authorities that have rule 
there.f (7) It is a fair inference that Jesus when He 
addressed the men on the hill, in the Sermon on the 
Mount, had already suffered at the hands of those who 
ruled in the synagogues; and the traces of this suffering 
may be seen in what He says as to " the hypocrites" who 
do their alms ' ' in the synagogues and in the streets to the 
sound of a trumpet," and there ''love to stand and pray." J 
2. But this exclusion involved a gain which was greater 
than the loss; to be excommunicated by the rulers of the 
synagogues was to be forced to appeal to the people ; and 
to reach them He had, because silenced within, to teach and 
preach without, where the objects seen in the open air, amid 
the scenes of nature — the expanse of heaven, the breadth and 
the brightness of the earth, the movement of the sea and 
thesound of the waters — wove themselves into the texture of 
His speech and the substance of His thought. He saw the 
cities where men toiled, the fields which their industry 
cultivated, where they sowed the grain which the soil fed 
and the dew watered and the sun ripened, where they 
planted the olive, tended the vine, trained the fig, watched 
the growth of the mustard tree and the sycamores which 
stood by the wayside. And he knew by experience the 
desert places where men by day watched the resplendent 
sun setting in the heavens, and by night could see the 
starry heavens. The ancient and historic cities like 
Tyre and Sidon, the well-watered land on which had been 
built cities whose modern names suggested equally the 
imperial Caesar and the Herodian Philip; or, like Caper- 

* May k xii. 39 ; Matt, xxiii. 6 ; Luke xi. 43 ; xx. 46. 
t Luke xii. 11. | Matt. vi. 2, 5. 



SCHOOLS AND SCHOLASTICISM 315 

naum — where soldiers, centurions, noble men dwelt, and 
tax-gatherers who ' * sat at the receipt of custom , ' ' and claimed 
" tribute " even from those who could not pay it — spoke of 
an historical past and of a large present, as well as an empire 
which could not live without its legions and the money 
which paid their "wages." The hills to the sides of which 
cities like His own Nazareth clung, and up which they 
climbed; the lake with its fish, the boat with its fisher- 
men and their nets, whence He could speak, as it floated 
upon the water, to the people who sat ranged along the 
shore; the mountains whose tops seemed to reach heaven, 
the trees which fringed the cup-like valleys formed by 
craters of extinct volcanos — were all fitter places for free 
teaching and spontaneous speech than a synagogue, where 
tradition governed and the ruler reigned by virtue of the 
very law he had to administer. And so the change of 
place affected the destination as well as the matter and 
the form of the teaching; it was addressed to the people 
and freshened by the breath of nature. The school is 
a subtle maker of scholasticism; and if Jesus had been 
simply a teacher bound in the traditions of the synagogue, 
we should never have had the common human interest 
He showed or the vivid and natural speech He used as He 
taught on the hill. 

IV 

I. The principle thus illustrated by reference to the syna- 
gogue, receives even fuller expression in a defence of His 
disciples, (i) The Galilean Pharisees had invoked the help 
of the Rabbinical School at Jerusalem, and certain of its 
scribes had come to watch the new Teacher and to criti- 
cize Him.* The point they seized on was characteristic. 

* Mark vii. i, 2. • 



3l6 JESUS INDEPENDENT IN HIS TEACHING. 

Your "disciples eat their bread with defiled hands." Why 
do they thus break ''the tradition of the elders"? The 
reply of Jesus must have shocked and startled the good 
men. "What is the warrant of your tradition ? To keep 
it you break the commandment of God. Thus Moses said, 
'Honour thy father and thy mother,' but ye say, 'Our 
wealth is Corban,'* given to God, and so it cannot be used, 
since it is God's, for the benefit of any earthly parent." So 
He says "the Word of God is made void by your tradition." 
(ii) He then turns to the multitude and bids them hear and 
understand. Defilement comes not from without, but from 
within. " All meats are clean, but out of the heart of man 
there proceed evil thoughts, fornications, thefts, murders, 
adulteries, covetings, wickednesses, deceit, lasciviousness, 
an evil eye, railing, pride, foolishness." f What could more 
illuminate His argument as to the impotence of the law? 
It is not enough to cleanse the body; the soul must be 
cleansed before the man can be clean. But this precisely 
is what the law cannot do. Men who turn trifles into 
divine commands degrade God without magnifying the 
trifles ; and without either purifying or uplifting the men 
they have compelled to obedience. 

(iii) He did not fast like the Pharisees. The Baptist 
had "come eating no bread, nor drinking wine" ; but since 
his piety was unlike theirs they disliked and condemned it 
as a special form of asceticism and said, "He hath a 
devil." Jesus "sat at meat" in the houses of Pharisees 
like Simon, or of publicans like Levi, and they said, "Be- 
hold a gluttonous man and a winebibber." J In char- 
acteristic fashion He made these opposite judgments answer 
each other, and with delicate yet humorous irony He 

* Mark vii. 6-11. t Mark vii. 14-23. 

J Matt. xi. 15-19; Luke vii. 30-5. 



HE REPEALS THE SABBATH LAW * 317 

likened the men of His generation to children sitting in 
the market-place and calling one to another: '*We piped 
unto you, and ye did not dance; we mourned, and ye did 
not weep . " * That was enough ; the men acted like children 
and played at religion. ''Wisdom was justified of her 
works." t 

2. Another point as important concerned the keeping 
of the Sabbath, (iv) The Mosaic law held it to be so 
sacred that death was decreed to the man who should 
defile the day. J The man who gathered sticks upon the 
Sabbath was stoned till "he died."§ Precept and sanction 
were exactly to the Pharisaic mind ; both were elaborated till 
the Sabbath became a burden, and the penalty for violation 
a tyranny of body over spirit. Hence there was no point 
where the action of Jesus could have been more certainly 
foretold; and here He came into early and vehement 
collision with the scribes. They watched how He would 
behave on the Sabbath in the synagogue, and even in the 
house of a ''ruler of the Pharisees " ; 1 1 for they did not think 
watching a labour, however irksome it might be and im- 
possible to a generous soul. He inquired, " Is it lawful to 
do good on the Sabbath, to save or to destroy life?" 
" They held their peace " ;T[ and they could do no other, for 
had they spoken they must have condemned either them- 
selves or their theory of the day. But they had the faculty 
which loved to judge without giving reasons for the 
judgment; and so the moment He had acted they went out 
and took counsel with the Herodians how they might destroy 
Him. But quite as significant was His apology for His dis- 
ciples.** One Sabbath He and they had walked through the 

* Matt. xi. 17; Luke vii. 32. f Matt. xi. 19; Luke vii. 35. 

J Exod. xxxi. 14, 15 ; xxxv. 2. § Num. xv. 32-6. 

II Mark iii. 2; Luke xiv. i. ^ Mark iii. 4; ix. 34. 

'"'^ Mark ii. 23-8; Matt. xii. 1-8; Luke vi. 1-5. 



3l8 * MAN NOT MADE FOR THE SABBATH. 

cornfields, and they had plucked and rubbed in their hands 
some of the ears, and eaten the corn. That was not lawful ; 
why did He allow it ? He replied, " David, when hungry, 
entered into the house of God, and did eat the shewbread," 
and every week the priests who minister at the altar fruit- 
lessly break the Sabbath. Your law, therefore, is not abso- 
lute ; the service of man where work is mercy, or the service 
of God where worship is work, may supersede it. Under- 
stand, then, what God meaneth when He saith, ''I desire 
mercy, and not sacrifice,"* and you will not judge as you 
do. ''The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the 
Sabbath . ' ' All positive laws are provisional, and are designed 
to promote human weal. The means must subserve the 
end ; the end can never become subservient to the means. 
The special case contains a universal principle. We may 
say of the whole Mosaic legislation what is true of this special 
article: Man is lord of the Sabbath; the Sabbath was 
never intended to be the lord of man. In all similar points 
the early teaching of Jesus showed an independent attitude 
to tradition and the law. 



V 

I . We have next to note how the conduct and character 
of Jesus defined and interpreted His words. To the con- 
ventional Jew, especially to the Pharisee and scribe, He 
was an enigma and anomalous, a reverent man, zealous 
in good works, loving the Scriptures which God had given, 
yet standing aloof from the usages which the religious 
men in Israel observed and honoured. He did not give 
alms, or fast, or pray in public, or keep the Sabbath, or 
wash His hands before eating. What, then, was He? 

* Matt. ix. 13 ; xii. 7. 



THE CONDUCT OF JESUS EMBODIES HIS IDEAL 319 

They could not call Him a Gentile, for He was by birth and 
breeding, by belief and custom, a Jew; nor could they say 
He was an atheist, though He lived like one; the most 
they could do was to charge Him with being inspired of 
the devil, though the charge died under His analysis * 
But the conduct which made Him an enigma to the scribe 
made His words luminous to the apostles. His neglect 
of the things the Pharisees held to be vital to godliness 
became their severest condemnation; for what His piety 
found superfluous could not be essential to religion. Thus 
a Pharisee asks Jesus to dinner, and marvels that He does 
not wash before He eats. His only reply is to reproach 
the sect to which His host belongs with cleansing "the 
outside of the cup and the platter," while their inward part 
was "full of exiiortion and wickedness. "f He does not 
mean to praise dirt, but to affirm that as "a man thinketh 
in his heart, so is he," and that religion ought to think more 
of the heart than of the hands. Cleanliness may be next 
to godliness, but can never be a substitute for it, any more 
than water can take the place of God. This teaching 
would have been meaningless and impotent without the 
witness and comment of His conduct and character. 

2. The higher law, then, which Jesus embodied superseded 
the lower laws of Judaism. The ideal of the Pharisee 
was separation; it was produced by his love of holiness, 
and produced the holiness he loved. To realize it his 
laws were designed; they made him a separated person 
living amid a separated people. He built a hedge round the 
law that the law might stand as a hedge round him. But 
the ideal of Jesus was love of man, the fellow-feeling that 
begot fellowship. He did not so fear infection as to hate 
and shun the sick; He so loved the sick that He did not 

* Luke xi. 15-20. f Mark vii. 1-23; Luke xi. 3-41. 



320 HIS CONDUCT ILLUSTRATES HIS OBEDIENCE. 

fear infection. He did not preach repentance to the sinful 
from the lofty platform of His own sinlessness, reproaching 
them, as it were, with His own irreproachableness ; but He 
spoke from the common plain of His own manhood, as a 
man who knew Himself to be full of God to men who knew 
themselves to be vacant of Him. Hence He was not con- 
tented to speak from the pulpit of the synagogue ; He 
must meet men who were His brothers; He must love 
them, for they are His neighbours. Hence He dines with 
both Pharisee and publican ; He is the friend of scribe and 
sinner alike, though, true to their respective characters, 
the scribes reproach Him with His friendship for the sinners ; 
but the sinners never dream of reproaching Him with 
His friendship for the scribes. The touch of nature made 
Him intelligible to those who were in character most remote 
from Him; but the art and quality of character held apart 
from Him those who were in nature more akin. Hence all 
His acts were natural, and expressed the grace that dwelt 
within. He worked no miracle to convert or astonish 
the Pharisee; but He cured the sick, gave sight to the blind, 
unstopped the ears of the deaf, healed the broken-hearted, 
preached the Gospel to the poor, and set at liberty those 
that were bound. Hence He could not allow His neigh- 
bourliness to be fettered by ritual, nor His humanity to be 
narrowed by the law which not only separated man from 
man, but fabricated by human art distinctions which were 
turned into religion by the invoked sanction of God. And 
the faith that was in Him did not simply terminate on man ; 
it formed a disposition that want could not embitter or 
poverty undignify. He had no place to lay His head; 
yet no head that ever wore a crown had a majesty equal 
to His. The birds of the air had their nests; but He had 
His Father in heaven, who had numbered the very hairs 



JESUS BOTH A TEACHER AND A REDEEMER 32T 

of the head, and knew He was of infinitely more worth than 
all the birds that ever sang in time. 

3. Jesus, then, began His career as a Redeemer by 
being a Teacher, and the implied functions in His case were 
coincident rather than opposed. New thought makes 
a new man, and He acted as one who so believed. 
While the forces opposed to Him determined the form 
of His thought, they did not contribute anything to 
its substance; that was made by the consciousness 
of what He was and what He had come to do. Our 
effort at the analysis of His teaching may have thrown a 
too exclusive emphasis on the opposition He encountered, 
and hidden the fact that its occasion was His success. 
Had His words been without authority, and awakened no 
response. His enemies would have been few and silent. 
They were angry, for they feared Him ; and He was angry 
with them, for He knew that their antagonism came from 
fear of Him and not from love of the truth. But the 
movement caused by His early preaching was extensive 
and intense. ''His fame went throughout all Syria."* 
Matthew says He was followed by "great multitudes from 
Galilee and Decapolis, and Jerusalem and Judaea, and from 
beyond Jordan." f Mark adds to the list of places whence 
the multitudes came, 'Tdumaea" and "about Tyre and 
Sidon." J Luke seems to distinguish among those "which 
came to hear Him," "a great multitude of His disciples" 
from "a great number of the people from all Judaea and 
Jerusalem, and the sea coast of Tyre and Sidon."§ And 
these mixed multitudes supplied the disciples who gathered 
on the mount to listen to Jesus. 

* Matt. iv. 24. t iv. 25. 

t Mark iii. 8. § Luke vi. 17. 



IV 



THE TEACHING OF JESUS IN ITS 
FIRST PERIOD 

I 

I. /^UR oldest and best epitome of the early teaching 
^-^ of Jesus stands expressed in what we are accus- 
tomed to name, from the form it receives in Matthew, 
*'the Sermon on the Mount." It is, indeed, incorrectly so 
named, if by *' sermon" we mean a premeditated, reasoned, 
and consecutive discourse spoken on a single occasion. 
But just as little can we describe this epitome as a 
collection of independent sayings, massed together with- 
out regard to time and place. We have, happily, two 
versions of what seems the same sermon, Matthew's and 
Luke's; the one represents it as spoken upon "the moun- 
tain" and to ''His disciples";* but the other as preached 
after He had come down from "the mountain" and "stood 
on a level place" with "the twelve, whom also He named 
apostles." t Luke's version is the shorter, and to many of 
the sayings which Matthew incorporates in the sermon he 
gives a different historical and biographical setting. J But 
it is easier to explain the abbreviations and displace- 

* Matt. V. I. 
t Luke vi. 12-17. 

J Cf. Matt. V. 3; vii. 27; Luke vi. 20-49; xi. 1-4, 9-13; xii. 22-31; xvi. 13; 
xvii. 24. 

322 



MATTHEW'S AND LUKE'S SERMON 323 

ments in Luke than the enlargements and misplacings 
in Matthew. In Matthew the sermon is distinguished 
by the vividness and the reaUty of the local colouring; 
in Luke it is comparatively colourless. In Matthew its 
background, which throws all its propositions, both negative 
and positive, into the most impressive relief, is constituted 
by Pharisaic teaching and the religion of the synagogue; 
but in Luke it may be said to be without background or 
any feeling for the contrast which heightens effects and 
justifies conclusions. Matthew's, too, is more of a unity 
and, in spite of its greater length, less mixed than Luke's 
version, which has sayings uttered in connections where they 
can be better understood and explained than when placed 
as here. In Matthew's sermon there is a continuity and a 
completeness which speaks of nearness to the author's 
mind, producing a more accurate report; while Luke's* 
may be described as broken and fragmentary, like 
a series of notes shortened from having been long kept 
in memory before being written down. But there are too 
many gaps in Matthew's argument to allow us to describe the 
document as a "sermon" ; yet it is too much distinguished 
by coherence of thought and unity of purpose to be named 
a mere collection of isolated sayings. Its continuity is, 
indeed, subjective rather than objective; its thought is 
vagrant, but not discontinuous or broken. It may not have 
the order we expect in a carefully knit argument, where 
each proposition rises logically out of its predecessor; 
but it has the order spontaneously begotten by similar 
questions in minds that must think together if they think at 
all. Hence the ' * sermon ' ' seems to have the characteristics 
of a series of notes or memoranda of conversations on the 

* Cf . Luke vi. 39 with Matt. xv. 14; Luke vi. 40 with Matt. x. 24, 25; 
Luke vi. 45 with Matt, xii, 34, 35. 



324 

mount, embodying what we may describe as answers to 
the inarticulate questions of men who were disciples in 
attitude rather than in mind. 

2. We do not conceive this so-called Sermon on the 
Mount, which is thoroughly in harmony with Jesus' 
character and history, as a sudden outbreak of words 
addressed to a mere promiscuous crowd; but as having 
risen out of His past speech and action. Its immediate 
antecedent was His going about in Galilee, ' 'teaching in the 
synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom."* 
That preaching had suggested many questions, which may 
be phrased and divided thus: (i) "What is the kingdom 
you preach about ? Who are its citizens ? What are their 
characters and their duties ? (ii) Who are you yourself ? 
Are you greater than Abraham or Moses or the prophets ? 
By what authority do you ^contradict the scribes, who read 
and explain to us the law ? (iii) What do you mean when 
you speak of making men the children of the Father ? Do 
you mean to change the religion we have received by tra- 
dition ? (iv) What would you substitute for this religion, 
for the almsgiving, the prayer, and the fasting we hear of 
in the synagogue ? (v) We believe in one God ; whom do 
you believe in ? What does God signify to you, and what 
does He do for men filled with faith in Him ? (vi) Have 
you a new law in your new religion? If so, what is it? 
Is it based on faith in the God you speak of?" These, or 
something like these, were the questions which the disciples 
could not but regard as legitimate, and which Jesus took 
as meaning a desire to learn. Every such desire He felt 
it dutiful to gratify, especially as they involved difficulties 
which He, as a Master and Teacher, was bound to set Him- 
self to remove. And this was the endeavour of Jesus. 

* Matt. iv. 23 ; cf . Mark i. 14, 39 ; Luke iv. 43-44. 



325 

What His hearers, who were disciples though not apostles, 
wanted, were the signs of knowledge which all could 
recognize. 

3. The discussions which ensued in consequence of these 
difficulties constitute less a sermon than what we may term 
"sessions," such sessions being so coordinated and combined 
in Matthew as to appear a single connected and coherent dis- 
course. Their general theme may be said to be the new 
religion in antithesis to the old, i.e. the kingdom of 
heaven in preference to any kingdom of earth man can 
either found or establish. This kingdom is here pre- 
sented as founded by the coming of its King. He came, 
indeed, as the Creator of ''righteousness," a term almost as 
characteristic of Matthew as of Paul, though it summed up 
to Matthew the purpose of the Law, and to Paul the truth 
of the Gospel. Law and Gospel only expressed to the men 
identical ideas. 

The term sermon so interpreted may be said to be dis- 
tinguished by the several sessions into which the discussions 
fall: the kingdom is conceived first through its citizens, 
whose final beatitude is persecution for righteousness' sake ; * 
secondly through the laws that regulate man's conduct 
towards men, where the motto is the need of a righteous- 
ness which exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees ;t 
thirdly through the laws which determined the worship or 
service of God ; J fourthly a discussion of the question, what 
is religion, introduced by a warning against outward or 
ceremonial ''righteousness" § done "to be seen of men"; 
fifthly a searching inquiry into what is the fundamental 
idea and ultimate purpose of religion, or the knowledge 
of God and the attainment of His righteousness ; 1 1 and 

* V. 3-10. t V. 11-20. } V. 21-48. 

§ vi. 1-18. II vi. 19-34. 



326 THE BEATITUDES AS DENOTIVE OF CHARACTER. 

sixthly through the new duties to man, to God, and 
to self* which spring from the new manhood created of 
God. 



II 

The theme of the first session may be said to be ''the 
kingdom " as conceived through its citizens. This chapter, 
indeed, which is the fifth of the gospel as a whole, par- 
takes more of the character of a sermon than any sub- 
sequent section. 

I . The Beatitudes which constitute the opening sentences 
are best conceived as a series of maxims which express the 
ideal of the perfect man as a man who contributes to the 
common good ; because he is happy in himself and possesses 
the qualities that make for happiness. Each beatitude 
has an ethical basis, and denotes a quality at once moral 
and religious ; the whole may be said to represent re- 
ligion as realized in character, and character as realized 
religion applied to the order of society which is here 
conceived as the kingdom of heaven. To conceive the 
miserable man as a source and factor of misery is to recog- 
nize not so much a principle of philosophy as a fact of 
experience; but to state the nature, the causes, and the 
constituents of happiness is to enunciate not so much a 
fact of experience as a principle of religion. Jesus does 
not here discuss the relation of holiness to happiness, or 
happiness to well-being; He simply pronounces the man 
who realizes a given character as blessed. But in defining 
the State through the citizen, in assuming the identity of 
the perfect man with the ideal State, and in declaring the 



THE THEORY OF THE BEST POSSIBLE SOCIETY 327 

perfect to be the only happy man, He turns philosophy into 
religion. 

2. Plato tells us that ''the best and justest is also the 
happiest man, whether seen or unseen by God and man"; 
and he adds that "the most unjust is also the most miser- 
able," even though he be the most powerful person in the 
State. He says also that ''the true legislator desires to 
have the city the best and happiest possible"; not the 
richest, for the rich man may be a rogue, but the most 
virtuous, for where virtue is happiness must be. Aristotle 
distinguishes between prosperity and pleasure, and says 
that while the vulgar may think the tyrant who can 
bathe to the full in bodily enjoyments both happy and 
blessed, yet the philosopher knows that only the man who 
lives well and acts well is happy, since happiness is a state 
which only the best and most honourable men realize. And 
this state must be an energy, i.e. an exercise of the highest 
or contemplative nature; in a word, happiness consists 
in the cultivation of philosophy in the temper and method 
of a philosopher. Boethius, repeating the old yet an- 
ticipating the new, tells us that beatitude is a state 
which is perfected by the aggregation of all good 
things,- and he describes the varied paths by which 
men have laboured to attain to it. The greatest of 
the schoolmen defined felicity as the ultimate end of all 
action; while a modern like Spinoza more truly conceived 
beatitude as peace of mind begotten by the immediate in- 
tuition of God. But the idea of Jesus is at once too rich to 
be defined and too simple to be analyzed. He does not tell 
us what happiness is; He simply specifies the qualities in 
respect of which He pronounces men to be happy. They 
are "the poor in spirit"; "they that mourn"; "the 
meek"; "they that hunger and thirst after righteous- 



328 

ness"; "the merciful"; "the pure in heart"; "the 
peacemakers"; "the persecuted for righteousness' sake." 
He uses no abstract and no philosophical terms, but all 
His qualities are virtues, all His virtues are rooted in re- 
ligion, and all are altruistic. Beatitude He conceives to be 
not a passive, but an active state. God is no idle deity. 
"My Father worketh hitherto, and I work,"* said Jesus; 
and Paul speaks of Him as "the ever happy God."t 
3. Happiness is thus not accidental or circumstantial, 
but essential; it is not put upon a man from without, 
but grows up from within, just as a good will expresses 
the goodness of a nature. The good act does not make the 
nature good, but the good nature does spontaneously the 
good deed. And as the citizens are so must the city be; 
each is conceived as the duplicate of the other; for 
what is society but a colossal man created by the cor- 
porate union of all its atoms, or constituent persons? 
Jesus sees that the material of which a State is built 
must exist before the State; and so He does not seek 
to make good men by means of good States, but good 
States by means of good men. Bad men will make 
good laws bad; good men will make bad laws lose their 
power to do evil. And so the Beatitudes show the means 
by which Jesus expresses His ideal and which realize it 
as regards what we call "the city," or society, but what 
He called ' * the kingdom of God . " . 

i. "Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the 
kingdom of heaven." J There are those who think that 
Luke's form,§ "Blessed are ye poor," is simpler and more 
Christlike than Matthew's. But Jesus did not imagine 
that poverty was a virtue any more than He fancied wealth 

* John V. 17. t I Tim. i. 11. | iv. 3. § vi. 20. 



THE BEATITUDE OF THE "POOR IN SPIRIT" 329 

to be a crime. What He feared was the ' ' trust in riches," * 
the pride of purse, the faith in "the almighty dollar," the 
idea, common then as now, that God would think twice 
before He damned a man of a given rank or status. Jesus 
put His social gospel in the first place ; He warns the poor 
against the sordid love of gold, as later He warned the rich 
against their ostentatious love of purple and fine linen. 
Hence the phrase ''in spirit" quahfies "the poor," as 
later **in heart" qualifies ''the pure." It denotes the 
region where the poverty is to be realized ; and means the 
renunciation and detachment of self from all earthly goods, 
which not only minister to vanity, but in which pride or 
egotism find only occasions for gratulation and self-enlarge- 
ment. Jesus teaches man to respect himself and not to 
glory in untoward conditions; for by the "in spirit" He 
bids him avoid the mistake of identifying poverty with 
destitution, which is as terrible in its own order as the 
correlative mistake of identifying well-being with abun- 
dance. The poor are to lift up their heads, and respect them- 
selves ; but neither envy nor hate the rich because of their 
riches. The noble man will not demean himself by thinking 
ignobly of either God or man; the mean man will never 
by vanity puff himself into greatness. "The poor in 
spirit" are therefore irw the most positive of all states, 
where the capacity for the highest good is proved by the 
intensity and the reality of the desire to attain it. Hence 
this poverty is not incompatible with wealth, but with 
trust in it; nor with want, but with the pride that is as 
vain of want as the fool whose barns were stored to bursting 
was vain of his abundance, f Hence Jesus says : ' ' Theirs is 
the kingdom of heaven." In that kingdom there are no 
rich and no poor, but only men. There is room there for 

* Mark x. 23-24; cf. Psalm lii. 7; xlix. 6. f Luke xii. 16-21. 



330 THE BEATITUDE OF THE MOURNERS. 

the righteous, but no room for any one who seeks satis- 
faction in anything less than God. 

ii. The second beatitude runs: "Blessed are they that 
mourn: for they shall be comforted."* This postulates the i 
evil and the sorrow of the world, as the first assumed its 
poverty and addressed the poor. Both beatitudes are 
significant of the social state of the followers of Christ, 
but the attitude commended is in each case very 
different: men are to overcome poverty of fact by 
cultivating poverty of spirit; they will respect them- 
selves the more that they pay but small respect to 
the things that perish with the using. Evil indeed can- 
not be resisted by evil, the wicked will never vanquish 
wickedness ; only the man who faces sin as a penitent has 
any chance against the sin he confesses. He prevails by 
his sorrow and conquers in the strength of his mourning. 
Thought has perplexed itself over the function of sorrow 
in this scheme of things. Man, it has been said, was made 
to mourn ; but Jesus says that the only fruitful and blessed 
mourning is that which as comforted of God becomes the 
condition and symbol of the rarest joy. The comfort of 
God qualifies the mourning; to be a mourning which He 
can comfort it must be a renunciation of the evil He has 
condemned. Pessimism enfeebles because it degrades a 
man; the happiness which comes forth from the grief 
which evil has caused, strengthens while it purifies. 
Schopenhauer declared ''a perfect saint and a perfect 
sinner to be alike impossible"; for man is born to fight 
a battle which cannot end without bloodshed, in which 
the victor must also be the vanquished. But the man who 
so thought never knew how suffering purified, how sorrow 
ennobled, how consolation could arm with the grace of God. 

* V. 4. 



OF THE MEEK, WHO ARE THE CHRISTLIKE 33 1 

Irritability is weakness; where happiness is an illusion 
and life a passion which can never be cheered by the pres- 
ence of God, the very capability of comfort will perish; 
and with it the desire for personal existence and the hope 
of a larger to-morrow. 

iii. "Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the 
earth. ' ' * The heir and the inheritance seem here strangely 
incompatible. But Jesus does not say, "blessed are the 
weak," or "those held under and despised"; but "the 
meek. ' ' This is the term He uses to quaHfy Himself : " I am 
meek."t And later Zechariah is quoted as bidding "the 
daughter of Zion" behold "the King who cometh to her, 
meek, riding upon an ass. "J The term stands opposed 
to "pride" or "vain-glory," not to majesty or strength. 
Indeed, no moral quality so taxes our courage or implies 
a more utter conquest of weakness by will. We may 
think of Jesus as "meek," but not as feeble; in His lowli- 
ness He is so potent that all the adverse forces of the world 
fail to bend Him. The "meek" are men who do not seek 
or desire revenge, who bear no malice, who do not find 
their pleasure in causing pain, who are able to esteem good 
fortune as fortune and not as reward they have earned by 
their own merits. 

^'They also Serve who only Stand and Wait." 

"Meek" thus expresses the same attitude towards men 
that "poor in spirit" expresses towards God. It denotes 
a man not swollen with pride or boastful of the full barn, 
who receives as from himself the beatitude and the grace 
which God's hands alone can give; but they who are so 
empty of good that they can hope to possess it only through 

* V. 5. t Matt. xi. 29. t xxi. 5. 



332 THE ATTITUDE OF THE GOOD MAN TO RIGHTEOUSNESS 

possession of God. And must not the man who can 
say "God is mine" "inherit the earth" in an infinite 
degree? He who feels that he must serve in order to 
Hve, that other men are more necessary to him than he 
is to them, knows that he cannot give unless they are 
there to receive. And "the earth" the "meek" are to 
inherit is not material, but spiritual; it is the Holy Land 
which is the symbol of "the kingdom of heaven." That is 
the only and the sufficient reward for all who love God; 
and such are "the meek" of the earth. 

iv. "Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after 
righteousness: for they shall be filled."* This amplifies and 
fills out the three ideas which had preceded. For the first 
beatitude expresses the attitude of the good man to God, 
the second his attitude to evil; the third, his attitude 
to man; and the fourth, his attitude to righteousness. 
After this he "hungers and thirsts"; without it he cannot 
live, and his happiness is to consist in being satisfied with- 
out ever suffering from satiety. It stands, therefore, in a 
succession which it fitly rounds off and completes. No 
good man feels the preeminence of his own goodness, for 
he knows he ought to be better than he is ; and the hunger 
and thirst after righteousness are natural to him. A Persian 
mystic used to say that to find God we must lose ourselves ; 
but it is no less true that to find ourselves we must lose 
self, i.e. we must die to live, cease to think parsimoniously 
of the little, shut-in, railed-off self in order that we may 
merge our individuated being in the universe. Life is made 
by its ends, not by its means, which are depraved the 
moment they are turned into laws man is bound to obey. 
And so the quest after righteousness, which is an end, is 
infinitely nobler than the pursuit of pleasure, which is but 

* V. 6. 



AND TO mercy: CONJUNCTION OF IDEAS 333 

a means to enjoyment. And they are distinguished thus: 
the one does, the other does not, satisfy ; the love of right- 
eousness grows with exercise, but the very capacity for 
pleasure dies with indulgence. An old English scholar 
once described another in these terms: "He appeared to 
be reasonable and just, as though Justice herself had been 
in him looking out at his eyes and speaking 'at his mouth," 
which was but to describe him as a man whose thirst after 
righteousness had been slaked. 

V. "Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain 
mercy."* This beatitude seems to breathe the very spirit 
of Christ. He taught us to pray daily to be "forgiven, as 
we forgive." As Jesus conceived matters there could be 
no righteousness without mercy, or mercy without right- 
eousness. The very conjunction of the terms must have 
come as a shock to His hearers. The Pharisaic righteous- 
ness was not kind, but narrow, exclusive, forbidding; the 
very almsgiving for which it was a generic term was too 
ostentatious to be generous. There is nothing so difficult 
as to prevent alms degrading both giver and receiver ; and 
the sequence of the Beatitudes proves that Jesus regarded 
"mercy" as at once the corrective and the correlative of 
righteousness. To think of suffering and want as God's 
mode of chastising personal sin may not tend to pity ; but to 
think of the person with the pity of God is to see in his offence 
only an occasion for forgiveness. Like alone can mingle 
with like. The eye that lives can alone see the light; the 
music within must go forth from the soul in order that the 
music without may not be mute; and the reward of the 
merciful is more mercy. Simon Patrick says of his friend 
John Smith, the Cambridge Platonist: "Those who knew 
him well saw love bubbling and springing up in his soul, 

* V. 7. 



334 



THE PURE IN HEART AND THE PEACEMAKERS. 



and flowing out to all ; and that love unfeigned, without 
guile, hypocrisy, or dissimulation. I cannot tell you how 
his soul was universalized, how tenderly he embraced all 
God's creatures in his arms, more especially men, and 
principally those in whom he beheld the image of his 
heavenly Father." He had the godliness which was god- 
likeness; the mercifulness that had obtained mercy. 

vi. ''Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see 
God . " * This seems to me the sublimest of all the Beatitudes , 
whether regarded as principle or as promise. For purity 
of heart is higher even than mercy; to see God is the 
greatest thing possible to man. The craving of the saintly 
in all ages has been for the vision which comes only where 
the soul is pure. The saint is the real seer, and his vision 
is eternal. ''Without virtue and real goodness God is but 
a name, a dry and empty notion." These words are true; 
and so are these, though they speak in the quaint tongue 
of the seventeenth century: "When Zoroaster's scholars 
asked him what they should do to get winged souls, such 
as might soar aloft in the bright beams of Divine Truth, 
he bade them bathe themselves in the waters of life : they 
then asked him what these waters were; and he replied, 
the four cardinal virtues, which are the four rivers of 
Paradise." The disciple is not above his Master, and none 
can know the truth as it is in Jesus save the Christ-like in 
nature; "the pure in heart shall see God." 

vii. "Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be 
called sons of God." f To see God with the eyes of Jesus is 
to love Him as Jesus loved ; and therefore to be a son as 
He was ; and the Son of God can only act as a peacemaker 
among men. The peaceful alone can create peace; the 
warrior carries war within him ; the spirit that loves the 

* V. 8. t V. 9. 



REASONS FOR CONSOLATION 335 

fray will make the feud. As God maketh wars to cease,* so 
the god-like have no pleasure in the shedding of blood. 
The life which came from God His sons will not extinguish. 
He who delights in God carries within the eternal peace. 
From it war can never issue. 

viii. *' Blessed are they that have been persecuted for 
righteousness' sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. "f 
This is the last of the Beatitudes; in what follows the 
person is changed, the direct supersedes the indirect ad- 
dress; the universalized idea is particularized, application 
being made. As the Beatitudes began they end, with the 
promise of the kingdom. The kingdom whose home is 
heaven may stand in contrast to the experiences of its 
citizens upon earth. Men are not righteous without suffer- 
ing ; they who cross the conventions of society must expect 
"persecution." We punish crime; but crime causes the 
innocent to suffer. While persecution is of man, all right- 
eousness is of God. 

4. Then the Beatitudes are rounded off with three 
reasons for consolation, which are specially addressed 
to the disciples as a persecuted remnant. J (i) They are 
to be esteemed as peculiarly and preeminently happy 
when evil is spoken against them ''falsely"; for their 
innocence will double the guilt of the persecutor, who thus 
does a wrong not only without cause, but against the light 
of reason or the weight of evidence, (ii) Their reward is 
in heaven. In this case alone, which stands outside the 
Beatitudes and, as it were, stoops to the level of men nursed 
in Judaism, is there any mention of a future reward. 
J^sus does not say with Helve tins ''that public utility 
is the principle of all human virtue." Nor does He think 
with Pale}^ that to do good is to act for the sake of "reward," 

* Psalm xlvi. 9. t v. 10. J v. 11-12. 



336 NATURE OF CHRIST'S MORALITY. 

for His morality is not one of self-interest, but of self-denial. 
While He does not think of a universe which God governs 
as the home of brutish evil or of forsaken truth, He as little 
conceives good to consist in seeking our own advantage. 
It has been said that in this the doctrine of Jesus is 
not so much religious as moral; but we say, on the 
contrary, He can conceive no religion that is not moral, 
and no morality that is not religious. His morals are all 
of God, and His religion is realized in the service of man. 
Yet (iii) , He would not have His disciples imagine that in 
the persecutions they were to suffer they stood alone ; they 
belonged to the goodly fellowship of the prophets. Evil 
hates the good it sees; good feels that in evil lies the 
tragedy of life. Where the Master had been hated the 
disciples could not be loved ; yet when most hated He knew 
that He was not alone, for the Father was with Him. Nor 
did they suffer in solitude; they lived in an invisible yet 
real society made up of the saints of God, who had been 
evil entreated because they had daily to rebuke the sins 
which men loved . * ' So persecuted they the prophets which 
were before you." 

HI 

The theme of the second session, where the change from 
the indirect to the direct address is significant and con- 
tinuous, is less easy to describe than the first was to 
state, yet this theme may be said to be made up of two 
parts, respectively, concerned with His disciples* and with 
Himself, t 

I . The Beatitudes define the city through the citizens : 
the disciples are citizens and the question is. What manner 

* V. 13-16. t V. 17-23. 



PRESERVATIVE ACTION OF THE DISCIPLES 337 

of men ought they, whether disciples or citizens, to be?* 
The transition to function and duty is logical and therefore 
natural. Where character and conduct correspond, an ideal 
relation is realized; and the men who realize it affect 
society in a twofold way. They are (i) preservative, (ii) 
illuminative. As preservative the disciples are to be "the 
salt of the earth," as illuminative ''the light of the world, "f 
As the "salt" they save humanity from corruption; as the 
' ' light ' ' they flood the earth with glory. 

(i) There was no idea more characteristic of Hebrew 
thought than the value of a good man to the State. For the 
sake of the righteous man God spared and protected the city ; 
and Jesus only extended to mankind the principle Abraham 
had enunciated in his prayer to God for Sodom. J The 
righteous man saved men, which function, Jesus says, 
His disciples are to fulfil by the same necessity as salt does 
its work. This idea of preservation not of set or conscious 
purpose, but by natural properties naturally acting, is cer- 
tainly contained in the figure. The man who thinks himself 
so good as to be necessary for the preservation of humanity 
is not good enough for the purpose; indeed, his good is no 
better than that which is done to obtain a mere material 
reward. Jesus tells us not that the tree is good by virtue 
of its fruit, but that the fruit is good by virtue of the tree.§ 
The salt by its very nature or inherent quality as salt gives 
savour to what is eaten and preserves what is without life 
in itself. The last calamity that can happen to a State is 

* Matt. V. 13-16, cf. Mark ix, 50; iv. 21 ; Luke xiv. 34-35 ; viii, 16; 
xi. 33- 

t The phrases may be described as condensed or undeveloped parables, 
which Jesus may have in speech expanded in the method of what we may 
term His middle period. In this, His earliest mature utterance. His dis- 
tinctive love of nature and feeling for its significance at once appears. 

I Genesis xviii. 23-32. 

§ Matt. vii. 1 7-1 1 ; xii. 33; Luke vi. 43. 
Z 



338 THE DISCIPLES AND THEIR ILLUMINATIVE FUNCTION. 

that goodness should cease to dwell within it. And all 
goodness is real. What has only the name of good is fit 
for nothing but "to be cast out and trodden under feet of 
men." 

(ii) Jesus then changes the figure in order that He 
may impress the idea the more upon the imagination of the 
disciples: "Ye are the light of the world." They sat in 
the light; it made their world beautiful, for without 
radiance where would colour be? What the sun and its 
light are to the earth, that were the disciples to be to man. 
It might be that they were but luminaries whose light was 
all borrowed or derivative, stars which do not dispel the 
darkness, but simply make it visible; still, they were to 
follow nature and to shine. For without them there would 
be nothing to illuminate the night or show the vastness of 
the heavens; things become colourless and indistinguish- 
able, and glory fades from earth and sea and sky. When 
night falls darkness reigns, and "all cows look black." 
Hence as the salt must not lose its savour that men may 
eat and live, the light must not cease to burn that darkness 
may not bring the night which is death, and where all 
distinctions are blotted out. In words so great spoken to 
such men madness may seem to lurk, but the madness is 
divine and breathes the inspiration of God. For only one 
thing has been greater than the words — their fulfilment. 
The disciples of Jesus have been "the salt of the earth"; 
they are, indeed, "the light of the world." 

2. The questions now concern the person and the 
conduct of the Redeemer, and the controversies, which 
had hitherto felt hot under foot, now visibly burn. 
The reasons for the persecution are here disclosed, 
and we can almost hear the voices of the adversaries 
framing their bitter charge. They had saic^ of Jesus, 



JESUS REPRESENTED AS A DESTRUCTIVE REVOLUTIONARY 339 

He was a revolutionary who wanted only to destroy; 
and they had expatiated on His presumption over against 
the meekness of Moses whose law was said to be eternal and 
immutable. They had shut Him out of the kingdom as 
One who had not only broken the commandments Himself, 
but had taught men to break them. They had emphasized 
His obscurity and their own preeminence ; had contrasted 
their obedience with His neglect, for while they had both 
pointed to heaven and led the way, He had done neither. 
They were clothed in a perfect righteousness, while He sat 
by the wayside a blind and tattered beggar, who had no 
status on earth and could have no place in heaven. On 
the basis of these accusations He had been persecuted; 
and persecution, as it had been His, would also be the lot 
of His disciples. It is to fortify them against it that He 
is teaching them the truth. 

3. He begins therefore by defining His relation to 
**the law and the prophets." These He has not come 
"to destroy, but to fulfil." Destruction is a primitive 
passion; it is the first impulse of the wayward child or 
the revolutionary man, who hates the existing order as 
tyrannical and would fain reduce it to the ruins which he 
fancies would be at once its fittest tomb and finest monu- 
ment. The particular man meant was as common then as 
now ; then he was known as a sinner, a breaker or despiser 
of the law, to-day he is named a Nihilist. But Jesus was 
not such a person; He, like God, knew that the way to 
the most radical revolution lay through evolution; that 
'*to destroy" was but to play into the hands of the 
tyrant who would preserve the expedient custom even 
though it should corrupt the world, and so He followed the 
divine method. He abolished by fulfilment, created by de- 
veloping, by educing the higher from the lower. What they 



340 JESUS CHARGED WITH WHAT HE WAS EXPECTED TO DO. 

expected Him to do was *'to destroy the law and the 
prophets" ; what they charged Him with doing was what 
they expected Him to do. That is a way men have ; they 
give a person a bad name, and then condemn him for being 
as bad as the name they have given. What Jesus really 
did was **not to destroy, but to fulfil." 

But did He mean by this phrase that He was to be the 
antitype of all the ancient types, the universal sacrifice for 
human transgression, the everlasting scapegoat, bearing 
from the face of God into a darksome wilderness the sins of 
the world? Did He mean that **to fulfil the prophets" 
was to allegorize sacred history and substitute one 
ephemeral fact for another? This was not Jesus' own in- 
terpretation, which implied a twofold principle, (i) That 
''the law" and ''the prophets" must be understood in the 
same sense; (ii) and their fulfilment as also alike. "The 
law" and "the prophets" differ indeed as God does, who 
clothes Himself now in darkness and now in light; yet 
they are unified by Him, and are one as He and truth 
are one; He is light moving into darkness through the 
gloaming, and He is darkness breaking by imperceptible 
shades into light. His will is enforced in "law," He Him- 
self is interpreted in "prophecy." The two are different 
in points of view as God is, whose will is "law," but His 
reason is truth. There is nothing in either "law" or 
"prophecy" Christ did not "fulfil"; in saving man He 
did the will of God, and so satisfied Him; in teaching men 
how and what to think of God, He showed the Father, and 
therefore pleased the Fatherhood in heaven. 



THE AUTHORITY OF JESUS EQUAL TO MOSES' 34I 



IV 

The third session exhibits the authority of Jesus as 
equal to Moses', on whose law He improves * 

I . We must remember how many-sided ' * the law ' ' was to 
the Jew, though he held all its sides to be divine. But the 
"law" Jesus here speaks against is the law as it lived in 
tradition and the schools, not as embodied in the temple 
and its worship; the law as the scribe and not as the 
priest understood it, as it related to murder, to adultery, 
to swearing, to retaliation, to the regulation of man's 
conduct to man and his obedience towards God, and not 
as it concerned the service of the altar and the sacrifices. 
This is the only sense that fits this argument and the ques- 
tions that emerged in the Galilean ministr}^ Instead of 
our division into the moral and the ceremonial law the 
Jews had another distinction more real and logical, though 
possibly made less consciously into the law as regulative 
of worship and the law as regulative of conduct, the dis- 
tinction which was embodied in the two governing sects, the 
law as regulative of worship in the Sadducees, the law 
as regulative of conduct in the Pharisees. Their notions 
of the law differed also, though in the one case the 
law lived, in the other it was dead. The dead law was 
purely conservative and local; its home was Jerusalem, 
and it served its end by maintaining the priesthood and 
regulating their ritual. But the living law was progressive 
and national or racial; its home was the school and the 
synagogue ; it grew daily in both urgency and size, drew into 
its net all the acts and all the thoughts of men and spread 
over all an equal sense of obligation ; it so made the little 

* V. 21-48. 



342 THE SOVEREIGNTY OF GOD SUPERSEDED THE LAW. 

great and the great little that to enlarge by a cubit a Sabbath 
day's journey was held to be as heinous a sin as to form a 
graven image and name it God. Hence came the maxim 
that "to offend in one point was to be guilty of all."* 
It was the law in this Pharisaic sense that Jesus spoke 
against. He proposes to supersede its outward regulations 
by realizing a more absolute sovereignty of God and a 
purer obedience by men. And so **the law" is placed in 
association with ''the prophets" to denote the Divine ideal 
of Holy Writ, which He has "come to fulfil," i.e. to trans- 
late into reality, to teach man how to live a life God 
approves, and to show him the face of the approving God. 
No sanction of this law nor any of its duties will He relax, 
for it is the law of holiness. The sinlessness of Jesus is the 
fittest commentary on His words. 

2 . From the statement of the idea He passes to a classifica- 
tion of the authorities who teach the law and interpret the 
prophets. There are those who break the commandments 
of God and teach men to do the same ; and there are those 
who by obeying teach obedience. f The first class are those 
from whom Jesus has suffered yet learned — "the scribes 
and the Pharisees." From the outset they "took counsel 
against Him, how they might destroy Him."± They 
charged Him with "casting out devils by the prince of the 
devils." § His most characteristic teaching was an offence 
to them; II they found fault with His disciples for not 
washing "their hands when they eat bread," and thus 
transgressing ' * the tradition of the elders. ' ' ^ They tempted 
Him,** and He had to warn the disciples against their 
" heaven. "tf The hardest things He said against anybody 

* James ii. lo. f v. 19. J xii. 14; cf. xxii. 15. 

§ ix. 34; xii. 24. II XV. 12, ^ XV. 2. 

** xvi. I ; xix. 3; xxii. 35. ff xvi. 6, 11. 



AND 



343 



of men He said against them; they were "hypocrites," 
''blind guides," "sons of hell"; they neglected ''the 
weightier matters of the law," "strained out the gnat" and 
"swallowed the camel"; they were "whited sepulchres," 
"built the tombs of the righteous," yet proved themselves 
"the sons of them that slew the prophets."* And here 
His words are at once severe and benevolent. He dislikes 
those who teach as "precepts of God" the "command- 
ments of men."t Their mistake is indeed common; the 
less divine a precept is in substance the more it needs the 
Divine authority to commend it; it is for their curses 
rather than their blessings that men invoke the sanction 
of God. But while Jesus speaks severely of this profanity, 
yet He will not exclude from the kingdom the men who are 
guilty of it. Their piety may be real, for they aim at 
pleasing God; but of all possible forms of piety theirs 
seems the poorest. Hence, He says, their place shall agree 
with their character, their status shall be in accordance 
with their conduct; they "shall be called least in the 
kingdom of heaven"; His temper lost its mildness and 
His words became fiercer when He had more experience of 
their zeal in shutting the kingdom against men. J 

3. The second class are they who teach and illustrate in 
their own conduct obedience towards God ; they "shall Be 
called great in the kingdom of heaven . ' ' These are the men 
He would make; and upon His own His demands are 
higher than His rebukes were severe to His opponents. He 
does not deny that the Pharisees are righteous according to 
their own ideas; but their ideas are not His, and it is the 
ideas rather than the men that He opposes. While He 
does not judge them as they have judged Him, yet He will 
so judge His own as to require that they be worthy of Him. 

* xxiii. 13-36. t XV. 9 ; cf . Ex. ii. 22. J xxiii. 13. 



344 JESUS AND THE RELIGION OF ISRAEL. 

The Pharisaic heaven may be an agreeable home to Pharisaic 
men, but His kingdom stands open only to those who have 
attained His righteousness. Hence comes the remarkable 
transitional verse, the conclusion from what precedes, the 
text of what follows: ''For I say unto you, that except 
your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the 
scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise enter into the 
kingdom of heaven." * 

4. Jesus defines His meaning by examples, especially as 
regards the two cardinal points which had been raised in 
the earlier hours of the session, (i) His own relation to **the 
law and the prophets," or the religion of Israel, and the 
higher righteousness which He requires, (ii) What He 
requires at once exceeds and supersedes the righteousness 
of ''the scribes and Pharisees." 

(i) These things are in reality not two, but one 
and the same. This unity may be described as fufilment 
by realization, or supersession of the law by the attain- 
ment of its ethical ideal. Jesus shows by His examples 
that the law could not produce a moral man, for its 
most urgent personal and social precepts were either 
not moral in themselves or had received an immoral inter- 
pretation. Its precepts concerned the regulation of out- 
ward things, and could not reach or purify the inner sources 
of action. His purpose was to get at the man within, and 
by changing him change his world and the order to which 
he belonged. He does not question or deny the fitness of 
the law for its own time, place, and functions; on the 
contrary. His argument would uphold its occasional worth, 
while denying universality and permanence to its form. 
Hence the examples of Jesus, especially as illuminated by 
His supplementary illustrations, are intended to show how 



THE RIGHTEOUSNESS OF THE PHARISEES 345 

potent evil may be in the man whose conduct is governed 
by law, and how impotent law may be to correct and 
eradicate the evil. 

(ii) He begins with an example affecting the sanctity 
of human life, and therefore fundamental to all social 
order. Murder. The law said, ''Thou shalt not kill"; * 
but it did not forbid and it could not curb anger, 
which is the mother of the murderous passion. His second 
example is adultery. The law said, "Thou shalt not be 
guilty of it," or ''covet thy neighbour's wife";t but it 
left the lust, which is its source, to rage and ravin unchecked 
within. His third example is divorce. The law said, if a 
man's wife finds no favour in his sight, he may give her 
"a bill of divorcement" and put her away; J but Jesus 
says, let marriage be inviolate, save because of adultery, 
for the woman has the same rights as the man. The fourth 
example is swearing. The law said, "If thou shalt vow a 
vow unto God, thou shalt perform it"; § but Jesus says, 
"Swear not at all; whatsoever is more than yea, yea, or 
nay, nay, is sin." The fifth is the lex talionis. The law 
said, "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth"; || but for 
it Jesus would substitute the law of compensation and 
service. The sixth and final example is taken from man's 
pitilessness in the struggle for life, personal and national. 
Do not say, let us love our neighbours and hate our ene- 
mies ;Tf but instead, "Love your enemies, and pray for 
them that persecute you." 

* Ex. XX. 13; Lev. xxix. 17; Deut. v. 17. 

I Ex. XX. 14, 17; Lev. xviii. 20; xx. 10; Deut. v. 17. 
X Deut. xxiv. I. 

§ Deut. xxiii. 21-4; cf. Lev. xix. 12; Num. xxx. 2-4. 

II Ex. xxi. 24; Deut. xix. 21 ; Lev. xxiv. 19-20. 

^ Lev. xix. 18. Jesus here represents the possible spirit not the 
actual teaching of the Law. Yet the extermination of the heathen 
dwellers in the promised land may justify the words. 



346 HUMANITY EVERYWHERE ROOTED IN DEITY. 

5. And here He rises to the height of His argument 
and shows us why He thinks as He does and why 
man ought to think in the same way. Humanity is 
everywhere rooted in Deity; we cannot fulfil any duty 
towards man unless we think rightly concerning God. If 
we are His sons, it becomes us to be god -like in temper and 
in character ; and to interpret law through Him rather than 
Him through law. If this is our principle, then we shall 
never be satisfied with a stereotyped law delivered to men 
of untutored mind and savage mood; but shall ever seek 
to raise our interpretation of law as our notion of God 
rises. And this is what Jesus here attempts to do. 
He says, in effect, — God does what becomes Himself ; 
and as He is good, the good is what He delights to do. 
Men may be His enemies, but He does not therefore cease 
to be their friend. On the contrary, "He maketh His 
sun to rise on the evil and the good; He sendeth His 
rain on the just and the unjust." * To love only those who 
love us is to be as the publicans, and not as the Father in 
heaven. To hate man is but to hate God ; the last thing 
we can do is to justify our hate by His love. But if we 
thus think of God, why speak of Him in awed breathless- 
ness and under an awful and august name? To conceive 
Him as Father is to see the barriers of race and colour and 
culture fall down, and men stand face to face with each 
other as brothers. And so Jesus ends His discussion of His 
revised second table of the law with a sentence which turns 
the highest truth in theology into the ultimate principle 
in ethics : "Ye ought to be perfect, as your heavenly 
Father is perfect." t 

* V. 45. t V. 48. 



THE LAW AN INSTITUTION FOR THE WORSHIP OF GOD 347 



In the fourth session the theme of discussion is ''the 
kingdom," conceived as an institution for the worship of 
God. 

The laws which regulate this worship are expressed in 
a general term or principle, ''righteousness "*and in three 
specific forms : almsgiving,! prayer, J and fasting. § For the 
proper appreciation of the argument two things must be 
remembered. (i) It is concerned with the worship of 
the synagogue and not of the temple, of Galilee and not of 
Jerusalem, of the scribe and not of the priest. This limita- 
tion is necessitated by the experience and history of Jesus, 
(ii) The principles here applied to the special problem are 
identical with those stated and illustrated in the previous 
sessions, (a) the invisibility of the things God most values, 
and (/S) the inexorable agreement of act and award. These 
principles are here affirmed with iterative emphasis. The 
disciples are not to do their righteousness or their worship 
"before men," neither to give alms, nor to pray nor to 
fast that they "may be seen of men." If they act thus, 
"they have received their reward," and can have none 
from their "Father who is in heaven." || The act which 
owes all its merit to what the eye of God alone can see is 
profaned by publicity. Hence we have phrases like "the 
poor in spirit'' and "the pure in heart,'' and an argument 
intended to prove the folly of attempting by outer laws to 
govern inward states; the prohibitions to kill, to commit 

* vi. I. "Righteousness" — diKatoaiJvr] — is a word which our Authorized 
Version, confounding interpretation with translation, here renders "alms" 
(cf. Deut. xxiv.- 13; Ps. Ixii. 9). The Revised Version is more literal, and 
renders "your righteousness." 

t 2-4. t S-iS- § 16-18. 11 vi. I, 2, 5, 16. 



348 WHAT CONSTITUTES THE STATE A RELI3I0N? 

adultery, to swear, or the demand of **an eye for an eye, 
a tooth for a tooth," are not religious or moral laws, but 
positive and civil . They instituted and administered a civil 
order, did not constitute a religious society or turn the State 
they founded into a church. Such a civil order, expressed in 
laws of conduct, tends to formalism; or expressed in the 
laws which govern worship tends to ceremonialism. The 
disciples envied, as the poor ever will, the riches that could 
be counted and they could handle; and so they came to 
admire ostentation which is the vice of the vulgar rich, and 
the ceremonialism which is the vice of the vulgar in religion. 
But Jesus here seeks to suppress these vices by evoking the 
opposite virtues and by teaching men to look with the eyes 
of God upon life as a whole, but especially upon conduct 
and worship. While righteousness is prescribed of God, 
worship is realized by men; and of such worship alms- 
giving was, to the Jew, a necessary element. 

A. I. Jesus says, therefore, that they are not when 
they give alms* to sound a trumpet before them; that 
may be ostentation, but it is not benevolence; it 
may attract the multitude who like not to give, but 
to see what is given, as well as the notice of those 
who prefer to ask rather than to tell; but it will not 
please God, who loves a cheerful more than a public giver. 
The words of Jesus here may seem more negative than 
positive, but the most positive principles lived within this 
negative form. Nor must we forget that these early are 
not His final words, or even His weightiest and most 
influential utterance. Philanthropy was His creation ; the 



* vi. 2. Our Authorized Version, which is here simply correct and faithful, 
translates "When thou doest thine alms." The distinction between "right- 
eousness " and " alms " is that between a general principle, which is one, and a 
special act, which is one out of many. 



THE GOOD SAMARITAN AS AN IDEAL MAN 349 

good Samaritan was in this field His ideal man ; the church 
He founded became the first, the greatest, and the most 
efficient of all charitable agencies because of the in- 
spiration partly of His example and partly of His 
words: "Inasmuch as ye did it unto one, even the least 
of these My brethren, ye did it unto Me." * 

2. But He has not yet reached the period either when He 
could say these things, or when they could be understood. 
He speaks to disciples, who are but children disguised as 
men. And here we must note where the words stand : as 
the first in the new session they are connected with the last 
in the old. There He had said : ' ' man ought to be like God, 
and love all men irrespective of character or race " ; here he 
says : "this love ought to be expressed in a service as secret 
as God's, whose left hand does not know what His right 
hand does" ; our love ought to be uttered as spontaneously 
as His, without any challenge either to ourselves or to 
another to come, observe, and admire our generosity. 
Charity, like God, is too holy for ostentation, pomp, cere- 
monial. "Almsgiving" indeed had come to have a sort 
of assured place in the worship of Israel. The Mosaic 
legislation was too benevolent to recognize so depraved 
a thing as begging, — for which the Hebrew tongue may be 
said to have no term;t but as "the poor were never to 
cease out of the land," special provision was made for 
them, and the open hand was commended as a thing the 
Lord would bless. J Job only speaks the language of the 
pious Hebrew when he claims to have been ' ' a father to 

* Matt. XXV. 40. 

f But see Psalm cix. 10. 

I Deut. XV. 7-1 1. Cf. the laws as to the tithing of the increase, Deut. 
xiv. 28-29; as to gleaning, Deut. xxiv. 19-21; Lev. xix. 9-10; Ruth 
ii. 2-19 ; and as to the Sabbatic year and the year of jubilee, Lev. xxv. As 
regards the New Testament, cf. Matt, xxiii. 1 1 ; Mark xiv. 7 ; John xii. 8. 



350 



ALMSGIVING AS AN ACT OF WORSHIP 



the poor";* and it Is but a fundamental maxim of the 
reHgion to say: ''He that hath pity on the poor lendeth 
unto the Lord."t Post-exilic Judaism made almsgiving an 
act of worship ; J and the more the legal spirit grew the more 
this duty was emphasized. § The dispersion created a class 
which the industrialism of the ancient homeland did not 
know, and the assemblies in the synagogues were used to 
raise funds not simply for the temple, but for the poor. 
What it had become the Pharisee of the parable shows us ; 
in the remarkable catalogue of virtues which he recites, 
giving ''tithes of all he gets" stands alongside "fasting." || 
3. This custom is no substitute for the neighbourliness 
Jesus commands, and so He condemns its opposite, which 
does not spring from love, and is without its universality; 
therefore it lives only within special communities, recognizes 
distinctions of race, seeks honour for the giver rather than 
for God. He does not mean to speak against organized, 
but agaijist ostentatious charity; what He dislikes is the 
act which depraves both giver and receiver. The trumpet 
which went before the donor invited the attention not only 
of the spectators but of the would-be recipients; it forced 
them to feel their poverty, and seek gratuitous relief without 
shame ; to lose the honesty and self-respect without which 
man can know neither dignity nor independence. A pauper- 
ized poor signifies an impoverished and deteriorated people ; 
and so Jesus hated the public charity that meant the en- 
hancement of one man's reputation at the expense of the 
common character. So He bade them give alms in secret, 

* xxix. 16. f Prov. xix.' 17. 

X Paul uses a favourite word with him, " righteousness "= St/catoo-uvi; 
in its late Jewish sense (2 Cor. ix. 9; cf. Psalm cxii. 9). Hence it is com- 
bined with " mercy " (Prov. xxi. 21 ; Tob. ii. 14), and the man who realizes 
these " findeth hfe." 

§ Tob. iv. 8; xii. 8; Sir. iii. 3; xxix. 12. || Luke xviii. 12. 



AND PRAYER AS THE SAME 35 1 

let not the giver know what he bestowed or the receiver 
what he got ; it was enough that God in His heaven knew. 
With His knowledge man ought to be satisfied. The 
principle was far-reaching and simple, yet hard to be under- 
stood. If His church had only understood it we should 
have been saved from those theories of penance and satis- 
faction which have gone far to turn Christianity into 
Judaism. 

B. I. As with almsgiving, so with prayer; a second ele- 
ment of "righteousness " or worship of God, or piety accord- 
ing to Judaism. The reference is in each case introduced 
in the same way, and constructed so far on the same 
lines. The disciples are not to pray like ''the hypocrites," 
the men who are play-actors even in their devotions, 
and who love to perform in the synagogues and at the 
corners of the streets ''that they may be seen of men." 
This is the thing they have sought, and it is the only answer 
they get. There is a prayer that can be offered in public, 
but it must be offered by the public. Prayer by the people 
may be as real as prayer by a person ; but. the people must 
be unified, personalized, formed as into a single soul speak- 
ing its desires into the ear of God. But the prayer here is 
personal, and crowds can only hinder it.* When man would 
speak to God, He must be conscious only of God and him- 
self; if any other being intrudes into consciousness, then 
the sense of standing alone with God is lost. The words 
spoken for another to hear may fully reveal the man ; but 
this is a revelation God does not need to have made, for 
He knows it already. The thing He does desire to know is 
what the man in his heart of hearts best loves and most 
seeks. In order to this the man must enter his closet 

* Cf. the invitation of God to "shut thy doors about thee " (Isa. xxvi. 21) ; 
the conduct of Elijah (2 Kings iv. 33). 



. u 



352 THE DISCIPLES REQUEST*. "TEACH US TO PRAY." 

and shut his door, that he may by shutting the world out 
shut himself up to God and there speak the secrets of his 
soul. 

2. But when the Master had come thus far a hearer who 
had not yet forgotten the brave actions and bold words of the 
Baptist cried out : ''Sir, teach us to pray, even as John also 
taught his disciples. ' ' * And Jesus graciously expanded His 

* The words which are taken from Luke xi. i are there at once 
followed by the Lucan version of the Lord's Prayer, which thus does not 
stand in the sermon in Luke. And many things seem to indicate that this 
section in Matthew does not belong to the original Logia. It differs from 
the rest in style and structure. The clauses which precede are each in- 
troduced by orav, which is an adverb of time — while here the introductory 
word is a plural participle (7rpo(reux6^ej'oi). The singular makes way for the 
plural, and thus the persons who sin are changed; "the hypocrites" are 
superseded by "the heathen"; and the sins are also changed /SarraXo^. 
yrjarjre, explained later by aroXvXoyig., of " much speaking," instead of the 
God who sees in secret and His open reward. And the paragraph which 
had begun with a reference to privacy as the condition of immediacy in 
prayer ends with what, viewed in relation to the argument and purpose 
of the section, seems a totally irrelevant exhortation to forgiveness. Then 
the section which succeeds begins {v. 16) with the omitted Stclv, and at 
17-18 the singular is again resumed, while structure and argument agree 
with those of 2-4 and 5-6. Because of these differences certain scholars 
have argued that the Lord's Prayer as given in Matthew, though in sub- 
stance accurate and authentic, is yet an interpolation ; and many have 
also argued that Luke has preserved its form and marked its place more 
exactly than Matthew, We recognize the difference, but explain it other- 
wise. We hold that Matthew has not only had fuller logia than Luke, but 
has understood and used them better, Luke has been more guided than 
Matthew by the subjective canons of literary tact and taste, and. has 
in obedience to these dealt more freely with his logia, which were 
briefer than Matthew's, breaking them up and incorporating the 
fragments in what he judged to be their correct historical setting. 
Hence he gives the prayer as the reply of Jesus to the question of 
one who recalled the method of John — in this we think lie is true 
to his source — but he places it at a period too late in the ministry of 
Jesus to fit the circumstances. It stands just after the incident of Martha 
and Mary and just before a parable, neither of which Matthew knows ; 
while it is followed, after an extract (Luke xi. 9-13) from Matthew's 
Sermon on the Mount (vii. 7-1 1), by events which Matt, xii, 22-30 and 
Mark iii, 22-27 agree with Luke in placing late in the Galilean ministry. If, 



MOUNT CARMEL AND ITS CRY: *'0 BAAL, HEAR US" 353 

discourse to deal with the special and peculiar difficulty of 
this man. For the moment the Pharisees fell out of the 
discussion^ and the antithesis was supplied by ''the Gen- 
tiles." Galilee had a mixed population; much of its evil 
reputation in Judaea was due to the heathen among its in- 
habitants. And so the Gentiles were brought in to point a 
moral in this matter of prayer. 

3. The Galileans knew Mount Carmel, and could read 
in their history how in the face of the prophet's chal- 
lenge the priests of Baal had shouted from morning 
till noon, "O Baal, hear us!"* So Jesus says, ''Be 
not like unto heathen men"; "remember your God is 
no blind and dumb idol"; "your Father knoweth what 
things you have need of before you ask Him." Speak, 
therefore, as unto a God who sees and knows. Address 
Him as (i) ' ' Our Father. ' ' Jesus does not attempt to define 
Fatherhood or to raise any discussion concerning it; He 
simply desires to let the name creep into the study of im- 
agination, modify their faith, and affect their conduct, 
(ii) "Which art in heaven," He says. The formula is fa- 
miliar, yet it takes a new meaning on His lips. "Heaven" 
is the abode of God, where He dwells in eternal serenity, 
whence He broods over earth like a gracious bosom which 
enfolds all and hears all, and whence He looks like the single 
eye which at once sees and illuminates and beautifies by day, 

then, there has been any dislocation, we are inclined to hold Luke 
responsible for it, and to argue that though he misplaced the prayer he 
correctly recorded its occasion. One of those who had forsaken John to 
follow Jesus was so intensely interested in the subject of prayer that he 
interrupted the Master to ask the question ; and the Evangelist, according 
to his custom, gives here the Master's answer without referring to the dis- 
ciple's question. 

* Kings xviii. 26 ; cf. Acts xix. 34, where another concourse of heathen 
men cried out, " all with one voice, about the space of two hours. Great is 
Diana of the Ephesians." 
2 A 



354 THE lord's prayer: its division and elements. 

or the myriad eyes that as stars break and glorify the dark- 
ness of the night, (iii) ''Hallowed be Thy Name." The 
holier God seems the more awful He becomes. The famili- 
arity which breeds contempt is familiarity with the evil or 
the common ; the more intimately man knows the eternal 
Father, the more humble and filial he will grow. The only 
majesty of God is moral majesty ; to make physical omnipo- 
tence the synonym of God is but to deify brute force. The 
devil invested with the might of the Almighty would be 
the most hateful of all possible devils, for mere strength 
could never make Satan into "the ever blessed God." (iv) 
"Thy kingdom come." His is the kingdom, and it is good 
and holy as He is. It has come and is coming ; it lives in 
time, yet belongs to eternity. Its temporal being is an 
everlasting moment. The only realities that never wither 
are the idealities that are ever in process of realization ; the 
only eternal is what is about to be. (v) "Thy will be done 
on earth as in heaven." The will, like the God whose might 
it is, is paternal, gracious, moral ; where it is done man is 
righteous, and earth is turned into heaven. 

4. So far the prayer has been concerned with the things 
of God ; now it takes up the concerns of man, coordinating 
these in a series of connected clauses into what seems a 
coherent whole, (i) "Give us this day our daily bread." 
Jesus does not teach us to pray for riches,' for the comforts 
or the superfluities of life ; but for its necessaries, which this 
prayer transforms from the means of living into means 
of grace. Existence is good, and so are the things needed 
for its maintenance ; but when luxuries become necessaries 
existence is depraved rather than dignified. Nor are 'we 
bidden to pray that we may be poor or ascetic ; but simply 
for the bread we cannot live without, though we may be 
unable to live by it alone. This is prayer in the Spirit of 



DISTINCTION BETWEEN "SINS" AND " DEBTS ' 355 

Christ, which is the only sense in which this can be turned 
into a prayer in His Name. (ii) ' ' And forgive us our debts, 
as we have forgiven our debtors." Here we pass from the 
physical to the spiritual realm, which Jesus conceives as 
distinct indeed, but as constituting a unity. Body and 
soul are opposites, but not contraries ; the same God made 
both, and they ought to be mentioned together in our 
daily prayer. Yet there is a significant difference between 
the two; we must ask that to the body bread be given, 
and to the soul its acts or faults be forgiven. But even 
between these faults there is a significant distinction. 
Luke says ''our sins" (ra? afxapria^ rjfjicjv); Matthew says 
"our debts" (ra o^eiX-qiiaTa rj/jLcov). The terms differ while 
they agree; "sins" concern God, and can only be figura- 
tively related to man ; "debts " are due to man, and can be 
used of our relation to God only in a figure. Then sins are 
broader as well as deeper than debts. The man who sins 
acts against nature as well as against God ; but the man 
who incurs "debt" has failed to fulfil the obligations of 
honesty and honour. The point where both terms meet 
may be the idea of unfulfilled duties; "our sins" are con- 
ceived as undischarged dues, "our debts" as failures in 
obedience, violations of the law of God. 

Yet the difference, such as it is, belongs to the transla- 
tions, not to the original. Jesus used but one Aramaic 
word, which the translators represented by two Greek 
terms. Luke, trained in the school of Paul, prefers d/xapTia ; 
Matthew, a Jew, who had studied the Hebrew prophets, 
6(j>€i\7)iJLa. Yet the equivalence of "sin" and "debt" has 
been something worse than a dubious good for Christian 
thought. There is no term that can so little express the re- 
lations of the guilty creature to the Creator as "debt." It 
has been used to deaden conscience and to silence reason, to 



356 "forgive, as we have forgiven." 

justify vicious theories of vicarious penalty, and to identify 
arbitrary right with absolute sovereignty. The sins we 
ask God to forgive represent a guilt which cannot be dis- 
charged by any legal quittance, or transferred to another 
soul than our own. Hence there is added a condition of 
forgiveness we can fulfil, and no other: ''as we also have 
forgiven our debtors." The gift as God offers it may be 
conditioned on faith ; as we beseech it, it is conditioned on 
obedience. The attitude of the giver is one, of the receiver 
another ; he who asks God to forgive must appear to Him as 
a soul that can be forgiven, (iii) ''And lead us not into 
temptation." The one petition concerned the past, the 
other concerns the future. The man whose sins are forgiven 
must not be forward to sin. God does not seduce to evil ; 
the seduction of innocence is a work which only a thoroughly 
bad being, careless of another's good, could attempt. To 
ask God not to "lead us into temptation " is a potent means 
of keeping out of it. The man in good moral health is cer- 
tain to be incapable of acts which are congenial to moral 
feebleness. The strong can bear the infirmities of the weak 
because so unconscious of their own. (iv) " But deliver us 
from evil." This only amplifies the finer petition; the 
man incapable of being tempted is freed from sin. And so 
the prayer ends as simply as it had opened ; the man deliv- 
ered from evil is a son of God and lives unto Him. 

But though the prayer is ended, the character of the man 
whose question called it forth stands clearly outlined before 
the imagination of the Master. And so He returns to the 
point the man most needed to have emphasized . ' ' Forgive 
us as we have forgiven," is a hard petition to utter; yet it 
is cardinal, and without it the prayer would be vain. So 
Peter, now as ever the speaker, was, because of his impul- 



WHETHER FASTING AND ASCETICISM ARE THE SAME 357 

sive and wayward temper, quick to say strong things 
against those who had offended him. Later he inquired : 
"Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I 
forgive him ? Until seven times ? " And Jesus answered : 
''Until seventy times seven."* This is the lesson which 
the prayer teaches to every man: "Forgive us as we have 
forgiven." 

C. I . The custom of fasting was deeply rooted in human 
nature, and well known in all the religions of the East. The 
cult of the ascetic is an ancient element in Brahmanism, 
and Mohammed made the fast an integral practice of his 
religion. The Mosaic legislation enforced it during the 
great day of atonement ; it was to be "a perfect Sabbath," 
in which men were to afflict their souls.f The practice 
grew, now encouraged, now discouraged by the prophets; J 
and in the days of Jesus it had become a sign of the severer 
piety, since the Pharisaic custom was to ' ' fast twice in the 
week,"§ once for the ascent and once for the descent of 
Moses at Sinai. 

2. Here Jesus comes face to face with the custom which 
He censures as a mechanical method for the expression 
of inward contrition. He warns His disciples against 
the "sad countenance" and the "disfigured face" of 
the "hypocrites" who want men to see that they "fast." 
He bids them "anoint the head and wash the face," that 
the fasting may not be seen of man, but of God alone. 
These were His earliest words on this theme, and they 
were tentative; later He became, in both speech and 
conduct, more decisive. The disciples of John and the 
Pharisees fasted often and much, while His did not; and 

* Matt, xviii. 21-22 ; cf. Mark xi. 25-26. 

t Lev. 29-31 ; xxiii. 28-32 ; Num. xxix. 7. 

J Cf. Joel i. 14; ii. 12-15; Zach. vii. 5; Isa. Iviii. 3-7. 

§ Luke xviii. 12. 



358 JESUS AS A BRINGER OF JOY. 

He was asked, why. * His answer was twofold : (i) they 
could not fast in His society any more than ' ' the children 
of the bridechamber " could mourn in the presence of "the 
Bridegroom"; and (ii) they could not put a new patch 
on an old garment, or new wine in old skins, without in- 
creasing the damage of the old garment and the old skins. 
What He means is obvious enough. He brings joy, not 
sorrow. Where He comes He ought to be received not with 
the bowed head and the sad face, but with the smile that 
greets the celestial Bridegroom. The methods of mechan- 
ical devotion, the cultivation of the outward form, for its 
own sake, may be suitable to the old, but is quite inappro- 
priate to the new. Pour the living Spirit into the ancient 
custom, and the custom will explode; the new wine will 
burst the old bottle, and both bottle and wine be lost. The 
soul is not made for the body, but the body for the soul ; he 
who would confine a new soul to an old body would make the 
outward lord over the inward, and matter the sovereign of 
mind. ' * There are celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial " ; f 
man's passion may be the preservation of the "body ter- 
restrial"; Christ's desire is to create the new Spirit, and 
then to let "God give it a body, even as it please th Him." 



VI 

In the fifth session "the kingdom" is conceived through 
God, its Founder and Head, or in its fundamental idea and 
ultimate purpose. J 

I . Some scholars think that this section breaks the con- 
tinuity of the sermon; but though there is, as respects 
thought and style, a gap between the preceding portion 

* Matt. ix. 14-17; Mark ii. 18-22 ; Luke v. 33-39. 
t I Cor. XV. 38, 39. I Matt. v. 19-34- 



THE THEME OF THE FIFTH SESSION 359 

and this, yet there is a larger unity which could not be 
without the smaller. * The fifth session is divided from the 
fourth as the second is from the first, but only as sections, 
where a subjective transition is represented in an ob- 
jective form. The new thought begins in each case in 
the same way, with the prohibition of an inference drawn 
by the hearers, partly from what they have heard in the 
discussions on the Hill, and partly from what they had 
learned in the synagogue or from the Pharisees. The 
prohibition t was, in the one case, intellectual, an appeal to 
thought, M vofjLL(Tr)T€: — ''Do not think or infer from 
what has been said by Me or about Me that I am come to 
destroy. "J The prohibition,! in the other case, is emo- 
tional, a command to the heart, fir) drjo-avpL^ere: — ''Do 
not, in spite of what people say I have said, or you your- 
selves may judge as to My purpose, store up treasures 
upon earth. "I I Jesus here rises into a serener air than He 
had yet breathed. He ceases to concern Himself directly 
with the Pharisaic polemic, and discusses rather His main 
idea as embodied in the mind and conduct of men. The 
key of the section occurs in the phrase: ''Seek ye first the 
kingdom and the righteousness of God . " ^ " The kingdom ' ' 
is collective and objective, " the ^righteousness " subjective 
and personal. Both are of God ; He institutes the one and 
He prescribes the other; the kingdom denotes the law 
man ought to obey, the righteousness the obedience which 
realizes the law. Jesus, as Matthew understands Him, 
means by "His righteousness" a righteousness which God 
has revealed in His law with Paul ; it means a righteousness 
revealed in the gospel. Unity is secured by both apostles 

* Loisy, e.g. speaks of verses 19-21 as "a sentence complete in itself and 
independent of its context " — Le Discours sur La Montague. 

t Matt. X. 17. t V. 17. § Mark vi. 19. 

II vi. 19- If vi. 7,2,. 



360 RIGHTEOUSNESS WITH MATTHEW AND PAUL. 

conceiving righteousness as proceeding from God ; but with 
Matthew it is what God prescribes and requires; with 
Paul it is what He provides and describes * In Matthew 
it expresses an authority which enforces obedience; in 
Paul it expresses the Divine will or grace conditioned, as 
regards its effects, on faith. Matthew conceived righteous- 
ness as conformity to the will of God as expressed in His 
law ; Paul conceived the same will as incarnated in Jesus 
Christ. Hence the evangelist describes it in legal and 
abstract terms, the apostolical correspondence in terms 
personal and concrete; and both agree in affirming that 
without it there can be no acceptance of man with God. 
The only righteousness which Matthew knows comes then 
from doing His will. The only righteousness which Paul 
knows comes from belief of the truth. Law is objective, 
and righteousness is its subjective counterpart ; what there- 
fore the law enjoins the gospel incorporates; law is right- 
eousness articulated in precepts, and righteousness is law 
impersonated in character. But this general sense of 
righteousness splits in these sessions into two quite distinct 
special senses — the Pharisaic or legal, and the Christian or 
evangelical. In the one case the righteousness corresponds 
to the outward or rabbinical law; in the other case, to the 
kingdom which Jesus preaches and institutes. 

''The kingdom " thus stands in the mind of Jesus opposed 
to the Mosaic State which the Pharisee glorified; ''the 
righteousness," to the eternal conformity which the Phari- 
saic teaching tended to produce. And these notions He 
here presents not in relation to the law and worship, but 
to the man and his life. Hence He says in effect : ' ' You are 
poor men, you have the passion of the poor for wealth, for 
calculable good, for corruptible riches; but the only riches 

* Rom. i. 17; iii. 21-26; x. 3-4; Phil. Hi. 9. 



36i 

which the moth cannot eat, or rust ruin, or the thief steal, 
are those that are laid up in heaven. Set your affection 
on things above and not on things below, and this unity in 
the objects loved will create unity in the love; for ''where 
your treasure is, there will your heart be also." But you 
are also men who reason; you have eyes that were made 
to see, and the most entrancing of all possible moments for 
you is the vision of God. And what hinders this vision ? 
Inner conflicts, the passion of sense, which by clinging to 
the visible hide the invisible, and turn the light within into 
a double and deplorable darkness. And is not this passion 
for the seen the cause of the Pharisaic idea of righteous- 
ness ? and is not the cause of the worship that can be seen 
of man the desire to store up treasures upon the earth? 
Do not think that you can obey at once the visible and 
the invisible, so worship as to be at the same time seen of 
men and approved of God. *'Ye cannot serve God and 
Mammon."* 

2. Jesus, then, here pleads for unity in the objects a man 
loves and thinks of, for only so can unity exist in his mind 
and life. He cannot be happy if he tries to serve two incom- 
patibles, or if — for this is the same thing — he attempts to 
pacify a nature made for the service of the higher graces by 
indulgence in the lower passions. We tend to think of the 
worship of Mammon as the worship of wealth by the wealthy 
man, who worships in the city; or as a mere fetish like 
the Exchange, where competing brokers gather to specu- 
late in shares, which here mean the comforts and the for- 
tunes of innumerable simple lives ; or some place like the 
warehouse where the buyer seeks to trade with the seller 
concerning the produce of multitudinous cunning but ill- 
remunerated hands. But if this had been Jesus' idea, 

* vi. 19. 



362 WORSHIP OF MAMMON POSSIBLE TO THE POOR 

would He have warned His poverty-stricken disciples 
against such service ? To Him the man who earned a daily 
wage could serve Mammon as easily as the man who specu- 
lated in stocks and shares. To do so he had only to will 
to do all things for himself, to be his own Providence and 
govern his life as it pleased him, as if there were no God in 
heaven. He might express with his lips a belief in the 
eternal, but he lived in time as if there were no other factor 
in time save the will incorporated in his person. Such a 
man may give God thanks while he lives, as though God 
were not. 

The worship of Mammon is thus as possible to the poor 
man as to the rich, to the workman as to the millionaire, 
to the son of industry as to the child of luxury ; it is but to 
live as if there were no God while by lip and by speech we 
profess to think He is. The forms it may assume are in- 
finite. A late distinguished continental scholar once said 
to me: "The most characteristic words in a language are 
those no term in any other language can translate, for they 
are the words that express the ideas most distinctive of the 
people who speak the language. Now the most character- 
istic word of your English tongue and people, without an 
equivalent in any tongue I know, is 'comfort.' The idea 
and the term you alone possess." In that saying there 
was humiliation as well as instruction ; the names for our 
higher ideas, "God," "the soul," "freedom," "immor- 
tality," can be translated; but no term in any tongue can 
translate a term so steeped in the new type of Materialism 
as " comfort." Yet our most characteristic ideas are those 
we most love. Suppose, then, we use the word here and 
simply say, "Ye cannot serve God and comfort," would the 
saying be false, and could it be said to express the mind of 
Jesus? The man who worships "comfort" worships care; 



AND TO THE RICH; CASE WHICH PROVES IT 363 

the more servants wait upon him the greater the number of 
anxieties that come thronging in their train. And it para- 
lyzes the soul and numbs its very feeling for higher things. 
Let us think of the woman who has soft carpets under her 
feet, maids to anticipate her every want and take out of her 
hands the labours of the day and relieve her brain from all 
effort at thought. She lies on her sofa and reads the last 
new novel, shedding bitter tears over the imaginary sor- 
rows of the heroine, yet they are sorrows she is too indo- 
lent to imagine for herself and must have imagined for her, 
and relate to some forsaken girl or some wronged and 
disappointed man. Below in her own kitchen, or in 
the slums whose gaunt outlines lie in the shadow of her 
stately mansion, darker and more gruesome dramas are 
daily enacted and tragedies performed by men and women 
of real flesh and blood. Her very comfort has made her 
selfish, and turned into veritable darkness the light that 
ought to have burned bright within her! There is noth- 
ing that so increases sorrow as the comfort that comes 
without labour, the wealth that knows no duty, and the 
selfish ease which has no need save that of being minis- 
tered unto. But God is duty and duty is God. And so 
the woman who is so active in the ministries of common 
life as to have no time to waste on imaginary sorrows has 
a strength and a joy that her idler and softer sister can 
never know. The unity in thought and feeling which Jesus 
pleads for means the beatitude of the dutiful, who have 
forsaken the service of Mammon for the richer service of 
God. 

3. But Jesus does not simply state His principle; He 
applies and illustrates it. There is a finer touch of auto- 
biography in this section than in any other words of Jesus.* 



3^4 

They could have been spoken by no man famiUar only with 
the gaunt houses, the high walls, or the mean life of an 
Oriental city; by a man who had not wandered through 
green fields, watched the birds of the air as they soared 
and sang, the springing grass, the golden corn whitening 
unto the harvest, the flowers fragrant and beautiful, the 
lily, more modest and therefore more majestic in loveli- 
ness than "Solomon in all his glory." And man moving 
under the bounteous yet careless heaven over the fruit- 
laden and laboured yet ungrudging earth, is alone bur- 
dened with anxiety in all this happy world, ever asking 
the questions which Nature hears but to rebuke: 
"What shall I eat? What shall I drink? How and 
with what shall I be clothed?" No person in history 
was ever by nature less a Man of Sorrows than Jesus. 
Sorrow came to Him, but He did not come a sorrowful 
Man to men. He was no ascetic, no incarnate ideal of 
misery with a face of utter sickliness expressing deep dis- 
gust at life. He meant man to be happy both here and 
hereafter; His very miracles are best understood as par- 
ables which expressed this deep desire. He pitied 
the blind man who walked in darkness, and He loved 
to open his eyes to the light which was life. The deaf 
ear, inaccessible to the music which nature loves to pour 
into the listening soul; the paralyzed limbs which refuse 
to bear man whither he willed; the issue of blood which 
drained the strong of his strength and made the woman 
feel that under it her beauty was ebbing away ; the hungry 
multitudes who fain would eat, and the thirsty thousands 
who craved for more water than any man could give — 
were people He loved to heal and to help. His pity was 
the outcome of His moral health, which could not bear to 
see either spiritual or physical disease. 



JESUS BY NATURE NO "MAN OF SORROWS" 365 

In those early days Jesus had a rare radiance of 
soul which seems all the brighter because of the dark- 
ness that was to be. He knew the cares of the poor by 
experience, for had He not lived from His infancy 
in a carpenter's home, which was house and workshop 
in one? And had He not walked on the hills round Naza- 
reth until He had learned the truths which Nature can 
teach the heart that loves her? So He bids the men who 
till the fields and eat their bread in the sweat of their brow 
''behold the birds of the heaven: they sow not, neither 
do they reap, nor gather into barns," yet they are 
fed and multiply. Why? It is God who feedeth 
them; but they do not leave all to God. There were no 
creatures so diligent in performing each day the duties 
proper to it. They never turn to-day into to-morrow, or 
bring to-morrow into to-day. In the springtime they pair 
and build their nests; in the early summer they feed and 
rear their young; and in the bright days that follow they 
add their own and their offsprings' gladness to the universal 
joy. When the hour of migration arrives, they muster in 
their multitudes and speed over the sea or across the desert 
to more congenial climes. The birds of the air carry a mes- 
sage which may be thus interpreted: "Leave the labours 
and the duties of to-morrow to to-morrow and to the God 
whose it is. To-day is man's, and in it he ought to do his 
work living in obedience to his conscience and to the Eter- 
nal God." 

4. But inanimate nature has a voice as well as animate; 
the flowers of the field tell us that life is beautiful just as 
it is full of the energy of God. Care may limit His energy 
or mar His beneficence, while it can do nothing for man, 
neither add a cubit to his stature nor adorn him in rich 
apparel, though it may decrease his moral loveliness. 



366 burke' S APHORISM ON MANNERS. 

Burke deplored the French Revolution because he fancied 
that with it would disappear the ancient graces of manner, 
the fine breeding and refinement that caused vice, by losing 
all its grossness, to lose half its evil. It was replied to him 
that vice by looking daintier came no nearer virtue; on 
the contrary, what made it seem more attractive only 
added to its power. Vice, by losing all its grossness, may 
become more of a fine art; but no art can render what is 
born of the brute in man lest brutal. The hideous mien is 
the fit expression for moral deformity, which is but accen- 
tuated by every attempt to refine the hideous. The art of 
Jesus is higher; He would not try to refine the gilded life 
of the rich, but would rather ennoble and refine the grind- 
ing miseries of the poor. The lilies of the field neither toil 
nor spin, yet they have a grace which is of God ; and will 
He thus clothe grass in beauty and neglect man? Let our 
chief quest be His kingdom and His righteousness, and the 
things we grieve over or become anxious about will all be 
added. * Jesus does not teach a quietude without thought 
and without will. He knew quite well that — 

Evil is wrought by want of thought 
As well as want of heart. 

But the two wants are one and the same; want of thought 
is want of heart. Though tfulness is a virtue ; thoughtless- 
ness is a vice. A careless man is a man without merit, 
facing life without any sobering sense of responsibility. 
Jesus does not say, ** The thoughtless is the excellent man,'* 
but, **Be not distracted, divided, drawn two ways at once 
by the fear of what may happen to-morrow. To-morrow is 
not yours, it is God's ; for you it may never dawn at all, and 
if it does dawn God will come then, and be present then as 

* V. 33-34. 



THE THEME OF THE SIXTH SESSION 367 

He is now." He thus strikes at the most common cause 
of human care. It is the expected that troubles, and the 
expected never happens. We may anticipate various 
forms of death, but we do not die the death we anticipate. 
In imagination we fight an innumerable multitude of 
battles; in reality we fight comparatively few. And so 
Jesus says to the men seated round Him on the hill: "Do 
what all nature teaches, and have faith in God; make 
sure of His kingdom and righteousness; and leave to Him 
to-morrow and all the to-morrows yet to be." 



VII 

In the sixth session the subject is the kingdom reviewed 
and its duties restated and reenforced. 

I. There is less unity in this section than in any of the 
preceding; and the lack of unity is reflected in the style, 
which is broken, didactic, such as may fitly serve up a 
chapter of fragments. Yet the fragments cohere when 
viewed in relation, on the one hand, to the speaker and the 
hearers, and, on the other hand, to the sermon as a whole. 
The section may be described as a review of the past dis- 
cussions given in the form of answers to suppressed or 
unrecorded questions. The first question concerned the 
criticism of the law of retaliation,* which had been ex- 
pressed in a way peculiarly distasteful to the natural man, 
who dearly loves to exact ''an eye for an eye, and a tooth 
for a tooth," and deeply resents being told: "Resist not 
him that is evil, and when smitten on the right cheek, turn 
the left." "What would you substitute for this law? 
Would it not effectively prevent your own retaliatory 
criticism of the Pharisees? " The reply of Jesus is remark- 

* V. 38-42. 



368 HIS CRITICISM OF THE PHARISEES APPLIED TO HIMSELF. 

able.* He does not repeal His law, but repeats and re- 
enforces it: ''Judge not, that ye be not judged"; but 
He adds a most significant supplement: "With what 
measure ye mete, it shall be measured unto you." What 
He means to say is: "I have criticized the Pharisees at 
My peril, and they have criticized Me at theirs ; according 
to the principles on which I have judged them I shall be 
judged; their criticism of Me will be applied to them- 
selves." This is in harmony with the eternal justice which 
either condemns or acquits a man out of his own mouth. 
Judgment is God's work, not man's; retaliation is too 
delicate an instrument for any hand but His; it is our 
part to make sure of the principles we judge others by, for 
God will inexorably apply them to ourselves. Then a 
second disciple intervenes: "You said that our righteous- 
ness must exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees.f Now, 
are we to measure ours by theirs, or theirs by ours ? " And 
Jesus replies:} "Do neither; measure both by the eternal 
law of God. Do not try to look at yourself through your 
neighbour, or at your neighbour through yourself; but 
cultivate the clear vision. Get the beam out of your own 
eye before you attempt to remove the mote from your 
brother's." A third questioner here rises and says: "We 
cannot get near the Pharisee, he is too proud to let us. 
How are we to prevent his haughtiness making us 
haughty?" And Jesus answers: § "Do not meet pride 
with pride, or anger with anger. The first consideration is 
not self, but truth; and the truth you believe is too holy 
to be cast in the face of the seriously insincere." Then a 
fourth hearer, more intent on his religious acts than on 
his neighbourly duties, breaks in with questions on prayer : 

* vii. 1-2. t V. 20. 

J vii. 3-5. § vii. 6. 



DOES GOD HEAR US? JESUS LEARNS FROM MEN 369 

How ought we to pray, and why? Are we sure that God 
will hear us? Jesus says:* *'Ask, seek, knock; pray 
as if you needed, and would die unless you received. And 
as to God, have I not taught you to name Him, Our Father? 
And you who are fathers know that you could not give a 
son who asked for bread a stone. And will God who is 
good be worse than you who are evil ? " 

2. But Jesus learned from the disciples as well as the dis- 
ciples from Jesus. The more He saw of man the further He 
saw into men; and so we find that at the end of this last 
session He became grave, concerned, admonitory. He had 
discovered that sympathy was one thing and conviction 
another; and that men who approve of the effort to 
strike the fetters from the soul may deeply disapprove 
of the obligations which in consequence lie upon it. And 
this, as He conceived matters, was a worse calamity. 
He had fancied that opposition to Pharisaic teaching 
signified acceptance of His own; but now He feared that 
there might be dislike of the bad without any correlative 
love of the good. And this new fear, which came from 
increased experience, finds a fourfold expression in the 
epilogue: (i) This fear is expressed in the parable of 
the two gates and the two ways, Jeremiah's *'way 
of life and way of death," f the one way narrow and 
steep, but leading to life, the other way broad and spa- 
cious, but leading to death; J (ii) in the warning against 
** false prophets," men who have put off the old raiment and 
put on the new without any corresponding change in them- 
selves, who appear outwardly in sheep's clothing, "but 
inwardly are ravening wolves." And here He enforces 
and doubly emphasizes His famous law for the discovery of 
truth in the man: **By their fruits ye shall know them." 

t xxi. 8. f Matt. vii. 13-14. 



370 HIS EXPERIENCE EXPRESSED IN HIS CONCLUSION. 

Jesus did not shrink from having this principle appHed to 
Himself; He only stipulated that the man who applied it 
should himself be good. ''If any man willeth to do His 
will, he shall know of the teaching, whether it be of God or 
whether I speak from Myself." * (iii) In the admonition to 
beware of becoming false disciples, it is not enough to proph- 
esy, to cast out devils, or do mighty works in His name ; 
it is necessary to do the will of His Father in heaven. The 
outward note of name availeth nothing; the only thing 
that can avail is the inward spirit of obedience. And here 
He allows Himself to speak as the supreme authority in 
religion, the final Judge of quick and dead, who can send 
men away into the outer darkness with the awful words, 
'' Depart from Me, ye that work iniquity." (iv) In a final 
parable which forecasts those that mark the end of His 
public ministry, He contrasts the wise and the unwise 
builder, the man who builds upon the rock a house that 
stands four-square to every wind that blows, and the man 
who builds upon the sand a house that tumbles into ruin 
when assailed by the waters of earth and the winds of 
heaven. There was little wonder that the multitudes as 
they descended from the hill spoke one to another with 
astonishment of His teaching, for He had taught them as 
one having ''authority, and not as their scribes." 

* John vii. 17. 



V 



*'THE TEACHING OF JESUS" IN HIS MIDDLE 
PERIOD: THE IDEA OF THE CHURCH 



T 



HE teaching of Jesus in His middle period had certain 
characteristic elements and features : — 
(a) As regards matter there is new and marked emphasis — 
(i) on ''the kingdom of heaven" or **God";* 
(ii) on the person of Christ, marked by the emergence 

of the name "Son of Man";t 
(iii) on such incidents and acts as the Cross, the death 
and its significance, and the resurrection, f 
(/S) As regards form- the period is remarkable — 

(i) for its number of parables as well as the purpose 
for which they are spoken. Parables are said so to 
distinguish the teaching of Jesus that it may surprise 

* The mere statistics are here most significant. In Matthew there 
are in all fifty-four references to "the kingdom," but only three occur 
before the so-called "Sermon on the Mount," nine in the report of that 
"Sermon." Of the twenty references in Mark two occur in chapter i., 
eighteen occur after iii. 24, In Luke " kingdom " occurs forty-two times ; 
three of these in chapters i.-iv. , but two of these have no reference to the 
"kingdom of God." The term "kingdom" occurs but once in Luke's 
version of "the Sermon" (vi. 20); and not till viii. i is Jesus introduced 
as preaching "the gospel of the kingdom," The phrase has a diacritical 
value. Thus in Matthew it is mainly, though, as vi. 33; xxi, 31, 43 
are sufficient to prove,, not exclusively "the kingdom of heaven," but 
in Mark and Luke it is more usual to write " the kingdom of God," 

f In Matthew the "Son of Man" does not occur till viii. 20; in Mark 
ii. 10 and in Luke v. 24. The two last are identical and alike official, the 
usage is everywhere solemn. The name appears only in connexions which 
are serious, 

X cf. Matt. xvi. 28 ; Mark ix. i ; Luke ix. 27. 

371 



372 ELEMENTS AND FEATURES OF THE TEACHING. 

some that they occur in a certain definite period; 
are addressed, mainly, to the apostles; and are used 
to illustrate the social action and influence of Chris- 
tianity. Thus the parables to which ''the kingdom 
of heaven" is likened, 

of the tares, 

of the mustard seed, 

of the leaven, 

of the hidden treasure, 

of the goodly pearls which the merchantman seeks, 

of the net cast into the sea,* 
are said to be spoken unto the disciples who pressed 
upon him with the request, ''declare unto us the 
parable." A like purpose belongs to the parables 
peculiar to Luke, like those of the lost sheep, of the 
lost coin, of the two fallen sons;t 
(ii) for the fact that the disillusioned spirit of Christ 
grows more didactic : He strikes a graver note ; He 
forsakes the story which had borrowed from the 
works, in order to illustrate the ways of God; He 
thinks less of the seen, more of the invisible; and 
becomes so changed that we find Him on the Mount 
of Transfiguration willing to converse with Moses 
and Elias, or other messenger from the unseen; J 

* In Matt. xiii. 24-58. In the third verse of this chapter occurs the 
first reference we find in Matthew to the Greek irapajSoX-^ ; thereafter it 
occurs in this one chapter eleven times, or twelve in all. In Mark it 
appears first in iii. 23, where the allusion is to " Satan casting out 
Satan"; but in the chapter which follows it occurs eight times. In Luke 
the Greek term occurs in iv. 23, where it is, quite correctly, translated in 
our Authorized Version as " proverb " ; in v. ^^ it is also found, and later 
with growing frequency, 

f Luke XV. See also the parables which explain the idea of religion 
as realized in man: "The Good Samaritan" (x. 25-37); "The Pharisee 
and the Publican " (xxiv. 9-14) ; " Lazarus and the Rich Man " (19-31). 

I cf . Matt. xvii. 3 ; Mark ix. 4 ; Luke ix. 30. 



THE EDUCATION OF THE APOSTLES 373 

(iii) for the new note which in His teaching is most 
obvious when He speaks about the mode and 
purpose of His death: He feels the need of speech 
the more, that the men He addresses are those He 
has educated, who ought to know better than to ask 
what they do * 
But our purpose is less to discuss the material ele- 
ments and formal features in the teaching of Jesus in 
His middle period than to ask the meaning, especially 
as concerns the education of the apostles, of the incidents 
described in Matthew sixteenth, or concerning 

Christ's Idea of the Church. 

I 

I. The incidents described in this chapter show that 
while the public ministry of Jesus had about ended. His 
education of the apostles was about to begin. The 
ministry had resulted in the apostasy of the Israel who 
lived, as they judged, *' according to the flesh"; but the 
education which concerned His own people, was to fulfil 
His promise and transform the fishermen of Galilee into 
"fishers of men," to make the disciples of Jesus into the 
apostles of the Christ. The men who consciously prided 
themselves on being God's peculiar people had not received 
Him;f all He could and all He did claim as His own were 
the simple and illiterate men with whom He then stood face 
to face. And the men had all the incapabilities of the un- 
learned; they were unimaginative, stolid, inappreciative of 
the ideal, unsympathetic towards suffering and every form 
of higher service, and had by a thousand signs shown 
themselves little fitted to enter into His mind, or to share 

* Cf. Mark x. 35-45 ; and Matt. xx. 20-28. f John i. 11. 



374 CHRIST'S INCAPABILITY FOR DEFEAT. 

His passion, to dream His dreams, to become witnesses 
to His truth and preachers of His name. If ever doubt 
and despair, the feehng of failure, of dissatisfaction 
with Providence, and the behef in overmastering cir- 
cumstances were justified, it was in His case. We can 
indeed fancy Jesus as saying, ''I am fated to fail"; 
and surrendering His mission with a sigh. But He 
had the sublime unconsciousness of failure, which ever 
comes of the incapacity for suffering defeat; and so He 
speaks to His unlearned and undistinguished companions 
as if they were kings of men and princes of time, men who 
could see with His eyes and could with their own hands 
build the city of God. Hence He inquires of them — as if 
He trusted not only the hearing of their ears, but the 
judging of their minds, *' Who do men say that the Son of 
Man is?" And they vaguely answered, ''John the Bap- 
tist, Elias, Jeremias, or some one of the prophets." * "But 
whom say ye that I am?" And Peter, ever swift and 
emphatic in speech, replies as if he spoke not for himself 
alone, but for his fellows as well : '* Thou art" — not Jesus 
of Nazareth,! not a teacher sent from God, J not the son 
of Joseph and Mary,§ but " the Christ, the Son of the 
living God." 

2. The words seemed to wake in Jesus a double vision, 
(i) He saw epitomized in the men before Him the ideal He 
had come to realize, the city of God He had begun to 
found, and the material He was going to build it of. 
(ii) But behind the men He saw the city, Jerusalem, sitting 

* Cf. John i. 19-21; Matt. xvii. 10-12; Mark ix. 11-13; Luke ix. 
18, 19. 

I Cf. John i. 45 ; Matt. ii. 23; Mark i. 9; Luke iv. 16; Acts ii. 22 
X. 38. 

I Cf. John iii. 2. 

§ Luke ii. 16, 33, 48 ; iii. 23 ; iv. 22 ; Matt. i. 16 ; John i. 45 ;vi. 42. 



HIS DOUBLE vision: THE CITIES OF GOD AND MAN 375 

visibly and proudly amid her hills, with the temple in 
her midst, where her chief sons sat darkly plotting His 
death. And the city had risen to be capital of the 
Jewish race because the temple of God stood there, 
not because the palace of the king who governed had 
been there planted. The double vision created a double 
feeling in the heart of Jesus, such as may have reigned in 
the breast of the Almighty when, on the morning of the 
creation, with eternal beatitude within and the infinite 
pOvSsibilities of time before. He said, "Let light arise out 
of the darkness, and let darkness become the shadow of 
the light." For what the Creator then saw was, as it were, 
in allegory, good and evil as the coincidents of creation 
struggling for victory in the very hour and article of their 
birth. But good and evil were seen as they seem to eternity 
rather than as they appear to time. God saw them just as 
we see the passing shadow cast on the hillside by the cloud, 
which could neither be nor cast a shadow were it not for the 
light that burns above it eternal in the heavens. The 
shadow may pass and perish, while the hills abide in purple 
glory and everlasting strength. So the double vision came 
to the Saviour's mind, first, of the church He had begun to 
build by means of these human souls and out of them ; and, 
secondly, of the human sin which was to erect His cross and 
cause His passion. But the double vision did not disturb 
the serene eye that saw it. Disasters dismay man, for they 
overwhelm him; but the Eternal, whom they cannot over- 
whelm, they neither disturb nor dismay. And Jesus, as be- 
came One who, while He lived in time, yet dwelt in eternity, 
was pitiful to the men who were to cause Him to suffer, 
and tender to the men who were to share His sufferings; 
but He knew that for Himself He needed neither pity nor 
tenderness. And so He could in the very face of disaster 



376 THE VISION or JESUS A PROPHECY. 

and death speak of founding a church, or building a city, 
which the gaping gates of hell should never devour. 

3. The vision of Jesus, then, may be described as 
a prophecy. While it follows a disciple's confession, 
it yet expresses the dream of the Master's imagination, 
and the purpose of His creative will. The confession, 
though invited, was yet spontaneous, not a formula He 
had taught or they had learned, but a deduction of their 
own minds, a lesson drawn from their own experience 
by their own thought. He had never said, '*I am the 
Christ," nor had He instructed Peter to repeat as 
if the saying were a clause from a creed, **Thou 
art the Son of the living God." All He did was to 
live with them till their eyes were opened, and they 
saw what He was ; till their ears, so to speak, heard the 
unuttered ; their minds conceived the unspoken ; and their 
thoughts drew the conclusions without which the Christian 
church could not have been, and with which it could not 
but become. For Jesus to hear the confession was to see 
the result; and His joy broke straightway into speech: 
* ' Blessed art thou, Simon, son of Jonah. Simple fisherman 
of Galilee thou mayst seem ; but thou art not what thou 
seemest. A leader of men because a pillar of My church 
thou shalt be. For thou boldest high fellowship with God." 
''Flesh and blood hath not revealed" this truth "to thee, 
but My Father who is in heaven." 



II 

The truth was twofold : (a) that Jesus was *' the Christ," * 
and (^) that He was ''the Son of the living God." For 
quick upon the utterance of this confession came the re- 

* John i. 41. 



WHAT "thou art PETER " MEANS 377 

markable endorsement: **Thou art Peter, and upon this 
rock I will build My church, and the gates of Hades shall 
not prevail against it." 

I. What does ''Thou art Peter" mean? This stands 
in direct antithesis to the phrase in the confession, 
''Thou art the Christ."* As is "the Christ" in the 
one passage, so is the "Peter" in the other. The 
name is in both cases not personal, but official; does 
not denote the man, but the office he fills and 
the character he bears. It is like a symbol expressing 
the quality he stands for and the function he fulfils. 
Peter, irerpo^, was the Greek translation of the Aramaic 
name Kepha, from the Hebrew Keph, Grsecized as /cr}(f)d^, 
and interpreted as signifying "a stone." f The almost in- 
variable custom of Jesus, which makes His use of Peter in 
the text the more solemn and significant, is to address the 
apostle as Simon ;{ but the evangelists often indeed used 
both names,! though their almost uniform habit is to speak 
of him as " Peter." || Later usage here overcomes the 
historical sense. Paul commonly prefers the Aramaic 
" Cephas, "T[ employing very occasionally "Peter."** The 
name Christ, which is an almost exact parallel, is almost 
invariably official in the Gospels and personal in the 
Epistles, and to this change no one has contributed more 
than Paul. 

* Matt. xvi. 1 6. Wellhausen, in loc, explains the use of both terms, 
in Aramaic as well as in Greek, as due to the need of changing the 
gender, which seems no explanation at all. 

f John i. 42, where what is so rendered is simply the Greek irerpos. 

X Matt. xvi. 17 ; xvii. 25 ; Mark xiv. 37 ; Luke xxii. 31 ; John xxi, 

15-17. 

§ Matt. iv. 18; X. 2; xvi. 16; Mark iii. 16; xiv. $7; Luke v. 8 ; 
vi. 14 ; John i. 41 ; vi. 8, 68 ; xiii. 6, 9, 24, 26. 

II Matt. xiv. 28, 29 ; xvi. 22, 23 ; Mark viii. 29, 32, $2 > Luke ix. 20, 
28, 32, S3' 

^ I Cor. i. 12 ; iii. 22 ; ix. 5 ; xv. 5 ; Gal. ii. 9. ** Gal. ii. 7, 8. 



378 AS CHRISTIAN TO CHRIST, SO PETROS TO PETRA. 

2. Now Jesus, who had hitherto used his proper per- 
sonal name Simon, suddenly drops it for his more de- 
scriptive appella-tion, and says "Peter"; and continues, 
changing the gender that He may the better express the 
idea, '' On this petr a'' — i.e. on this rock — ''will I build My 
church." What did He mean?* As the term Christian 
stands related to the name Christ, so the title Peter stands 
related to this Petra. The great Rock, the Petra, un- 
quarried, unbroken, eternal, is Christ Himself. The stone 
hewn from it is petros, the man Peter, so named because 
like in quality and in character to the Rock whence he 
was hewn. And the two words, by their felicitous con- 
junction, express this idea, that foundation and super- 
structure are all of one piece. The superstructure springs 
from the solid Rock, rises from it four-square, massive, 
immovable, the building growing out of the foundation, 
with all its parts so welded and bound together as to face 
without fear every wind that may blow, and defy every 
storm that may rage. 

The meaning here placed upon the figure is Peter's 
own; of all the apostles he is the one who most loves the 
analogy of the rock and the stone. In one of his earliest 
discourses he speaks of the stone which was ''set at nought 
of you builders," but which God had made " the head stone 
of the corner." t In the First Epistle which bears his name, 
he speaks of the Lord as "a living stone, disallowed indeed 
of men, but chosen of God and precious" ; while Christians 
are "living stones," "built into a spiritual house." J The 
oIko^ nTvevixaTLK6<; of Peter is but the eKKXr^crla of Christ ;§ 

* Wellhausen says that Simon rightly bears the surname irirpos for 
"the church" (die Gemeinde = the Christian people) " is not founded by 
Jesus, but through the resurrection, and Peter has the merit of having 
first seen the risen Lord." 

t Acts iv. II. +1 Peter ii. 4-8. 

§ The term iKKK-qala does not once occur in either i or 2 Peter. 



PETER THE SORT OF MAN THE CHURCH IS BUILT OF 379 

and where Jesus speaks of Petra and Petros, Peter speaks 
of ''the chief stone of the corner" and **the living stones" 
built around and upon it. They mean, then, the same 
thing; the stone and the rock are one in nature, in kind 
and in quality. What is taken forth from the great encom- 
passing bosom of the eternal Rock is a living stone, and 
therefore is fitted to find a place in the superstructure. 

3. Peter, then, stands here as a symbol, a type, and 
signifies the sort of man Jesus was to build His church 
of; but when he heard he little knew what was meant by 
the Rock and the Stone, by the Builder and the building. 
He had to live many years, and learn much by suffering 
much, before he could even conceiye what the terms sig- 
nified. But one thing we may venture to say, he never 
could have imagined that his name was to be one of the 
longest lived and most potent in history ; that he was to be 
the leading figure in one of our most permanent controver- 
sies ; that his place amid the apostles and his relation to his 
Master were to be much-debated questions ; that an august 
and ancient Society was to claim him as its founder and 
head ; and that our verse was to be construed as a personal 
promise that he should be its supreme Bishop, the one 
genuine representative in the religion of Christ. From 
Rome he was to govern the church. The brawny and 
breezy fisherman, Milton's "Pilot of the Galilean Lake," 
who could not speak Latin, who had never heard of the great 
names in its literature, whether Cicero or Lucretius, Virgil or 
Horace, who knew nothing of the empire and the emperor 
save what a vagrant soldier or an itinerant sailor may have 
told him, was to be the first of a dynasty which should dis- 
place the Caesars and enthrone the Popes. There is no 
romance in history equal to it; no miracle that is its fellow. 
For all his functions and prerogatives were conveyed to 



380 IMAGINARY SPEECH OF PETER 

them as his successors in the see ; and they as heirs to his 
chair were also to inherit the promise made to him, and, 
Hke him, to become vicars of Christ, endowed with such 
an infalUbiHty or incapacity to err in matters of faith as 
secures the continued hfe of Christian truth in the world. 

4. But suppose — though I grant the supposition is vio- 
lent — Peter could have been made to understand this idea 
and the arguments for it, what would he have said? Prob- 
ably something like this : — 

''I never heard the Master utter any such promise. 
My memory is indeed rich in His reproofs, for I was a 
foolish man, forward in speech and unripe in judg- 
ment ; and well do I remember the answer He gave when 
we asked Him, 'Who is the greatest in the kingdom of 
heaven?'* Indeed, I can never see a little child without 
hearing His voice, recalling His words, and seeing the look 
that then came into His eyes. Nor can I forget the lesson 
He gave my presumption when I requested to be allowed 
to walk with Him on the water and He bade me *come,'t 
or my bearing when I obeyed with reluctance; only to 
discover how His words were justified by the result, and 
I could only clasp His knees and cry, 'Depart from me, 
for I am a sinful man, O Lord. 'J Or His reply to my 
daring question, ' How often shall I forgive an offending 
brother? '§ or the pride which went before an early and 
utter fall, with which I heard but did not believe His warn- 
ing that Satan desired to sift me as wheat. || But I was 
not the only culprit in our little band. I remember what 
He said when a mother requested that her sons might 
be allowed to sit the one on His right hand and the other 
on His left in His kingdom; how His ideal was not the 

* Matt, xviii. 1-6, f Ihid., xiv. 28-30. J Luke v. 3-8. 

§ Matt, xviii. 21, 22. || Luke xxii. 31-4. 



AND HIS MISTAKES AS RECITED BY HIMSELF 381 

exercise of authority, but rather a ministry of service and 
of sacrifice * You speak of me as forward, impulsive, un- 
stable, irritable, and easily provoked; and I was all that 
you say in a degree beyond what you can conceive, and in 
a manner that would have made it madness to invest me 
with qualities that better become a god than a man. And 
were you to force me into preeminence by means of this 
text, it would only be to force me to suffer degradation 
from a verse which immediately follows it. For the mem- 
ory of His gracious words begot such pride and insolence in 
my heart that I hastened to advise Him in a matter so 
high and to me so inscrutable as His passion. And so 
when He began to show unto us how that at Jerusalem 
He must suffer many things of the elders and chief priests 
and scribes, I cried out, 'God forbid; this shall never 
happen unto Thee.' But He, with ineffable pity, yet in 
stern reproof, replied: 'Get thee behind Me, Satan, for 
thou mindest not the things of God, but the things of men.'f 
In me, as in all men, the devil lived near the saint, and 
profanity followed hard on the heels of piety; but surely 
the man He could address now as Peter — the rock or living 
stone of which His church was to be built — and now as 
Satan, and in each case with equal justice. He would 
never nominate to be the visible head of His church." 

He does not say, upon the man named Peter, but upon 
the rock whence he was hewn. He should build the church 
He founded, though He does say, that of such men His 
church was to be composed. Then what He withheld was 
even more remarkable than what He gave. His speech 
concerned a man who impersonated a given character, but 
men who had opposite characters it did not concern. 
He made no promise as to Peter's successors; He never 

* Matt. XX. 20-4; cf. Mark x. 35-40. f Matt. xvi. 21-3. 



382 THE BISHOPS or ROME A MIXED MULTITUDE. 

said that Peter should have any successors; least of all 
did He say that they were to be so mixed a multitude 
as the Bishops of Rome. We may, then, think of Peter 
as continuing and ending His speech thus : — 

'' Indeed I never remember Him speaking either of Rome 
or of Bishops or any succession, nor did He ever say that any 
person could succeed to any office He had created, nor that 
any office He created could invest its occupant with infalli- 
bility or any form of incapacity to err. He was ever the 
Saviour whose care was for man, and when He spoke of His 
church He thought of no place, no time, no order, and no' 
officials ; but only of what He Himself was to build and the 
quality of the men He was to use in the building." 

In the verse, then, Peter is simply the typical Christian, 
but Christ Himself is the Fetra, He out of whom the living 
stones are hewn, the immovable bed-rock upon which they 
are built ; and these two — the Petros and the Petra — 
are one and therefore homogeneous, the foundation and 
the superstructure forming in material and design a unity 
which rises with marvellous beauty the one from the 
other as by the act and according to the architecture of 
God. 

HI 

I. We dismiss Peter, then, and turn to our main theme: 
Christ's idea of the church. And here difficulties of another 
and even graver order meet us. (i) We have to conceive, 
and, if possible, explain, the singular and remarkable fact 
that this is the only reference which Christ ever makes to 
His church universal.* And this fact is all the more singu- 

* In the only other instance in which the term we render " church " is 
placed by the Gospels, as we have them in Greek and not in Aramaic, in the 
mouth of Jesus, it is used to denote a community or a particular congregation. 
Matt, xviii. 17. 



NOWHERE ELSE DOES " CHURCH" AS UNIVERSAL OCCUR 383 

lar when we consider the extraordinary place the idea has 
filled in the thought of His people, and the way in which it 
has been for centuries an occasion for battles both of mind 
and blood. And what is still more strange than the want 
of any parallel verse by which the passage may be inter- 
preted, is that the idea is introduced not as new, or im- 
portant, or emphatic, but as old and apparently familiar. 
This seems to be indicated in the solitary occurrence of 
the name: eKKk-qaCa is in no way defined or accentuated, 
but simply introduced like the idea of **the kingdom of 
heaven." (ii) It is not surprising, therefore, that scholars 
have raised many questions concerning the meaning and 
the use of eKicK'qaia. The dissonant voices of men refuse, 
rightly indeed, to be stilled even in the audience-chamber of 
the Holiest ; and differences as honest and honourable ought 
not to separate men or keep them silent even in the presence 
of God. His presence is not, therefore, the place where 
difTerences ought to be suppressed. The mood of everlast- 
ing calm is sacred and becomes man only where no difference 
is; there nothing should be allowed to break in and mar 
it. (iii) It is a small comipliment to say, men differ about 
the church on the surface, while they are at heart agreed. 
The agreement is apparent and the differences are real; 
every question of church is at bottom a question of applied 
religion, of Christianity as realized in society and the State, 
or in man and history, (iv) The difficulties which beget 
our differences spring from a fact, simple, fundamental, in- 
contestable: the Gospels are not written in the language 
which Jesus was accustomed to speak. The Gospels 
are written in Greek, while He was accustomed to 
speak in Aramaic, and He did more than speak. He 
taught in it also. What we have, therefore, is a trans- 
lation, thought expressed in a tongue foreign to the 



384 ''church" four times removed from the original. 

Master, with associations that may be ours, but were 
not His. 

2. Now, the point where those difficulties become most 
cardinal and most acute is in a term like that which 
here concerns us, which is, as it were, four times removed 
from the original. ''Church" is a translation of a trans- 
lation of a translation ; * and translations have a trick of 
moving, as by arithmetical progression, away from the 
fontal sense. The deduction is inevitable — the term must 
be explained by the Epistles, not its use in the Epistles 
by the gospels. The point is worth making, were it only 
because some scholars who know the facts argue as if the 
facts either were not, or were different from what they are. 
We cannot have it both ways : either Jesus taught in Greek 
and not in Aramaic, or He taught in Aramaic and not in 
Greek. If the first alternative be adopted, we have still 
to explain why the last books to be written should be 
judged by many and dealt with by all as if they had been 
the first to exist; if the second alternative be accepted, 
then we have also to explain why a translation should have 
more meaning and merit and fontal truth than the original. 
The Greek term eV/c\r;a-ia, which here translates the Aramaic 
word Jesus had used, was neither a coinage nor an invention 
of the evangelist ; but it had even before he used it an ancient 
and honourable history and a fixed meaning alike in Hellen- 
istic and in classical Greek. In its classical sense it denoted 

* "Church" is a translation of KvpiaKov, the representative in late 
Greek of eKKk-qaia, but not its equivalent or synonym. For iKKXrjaia 
belonged to classical Greek, and to a time when men were valued as 
men and not simply by their dignity as of&cials ; KvpiaKov had an oppo- 
site sense, and magnified the "day" or "place" as sacred to the 
"Lord," the master who possessed men. The terms were therefore 
different, though iKKk-qaia alone was the translation of the Aramaic 
original, kvplclkov appears in our version as an adjective, i Cor.xi. 20; 
Rev. i. 10. 



THE HELLENIC ASSEMBLY OF ENFRANCHIZED CITIZENS 385 

the assembly of the free or enfranchized citizens who 
met to transact the affairs and to frame or administer the 
laws of the city. To sit in the eKH:\7]<jia was the birth- 
right of every free-born Greek, who held it to be as well 
the guardian of his freedom and his privileges as the means 
by which he could in the sphere of public or political life 
realize his ideals. Its Hellenistic meaning was fixed by 
the makers of the Septuagint, who used it to translate the 
Hebrew Kahal, the congregation or assembly of collective 
Israel, i.e. the people — not as represented by the priest- 
hood or the clergy, nor as congregated under these in the 
temple — but as gathered together in their common or 
corporate being as the elect of God, a nation whose civil 
affairs were all religious, and whose religious functions were 
the concern of all. 

3. The term had been, then, in its Christian sense used 
by apostolical writers almost a generation before this 
gospel existed in its present form, and from them as men 
who thought in Hebrew, while they spoke or wrote in 
Greek, it received an interpretation which instructively 
blended the classical and Hellenistic meanings.* The 

* The custom of scholars used to be to explain the prevalence and 
meaning of the term eKKXrjaia through the LXX., and therefore through 
Hellenistic Greek. Then it became customary to conceive it through the 
Hellenic and classic sense ; now it is common to combine both methods and 
explain its meaning through Greek and its prevalence through the LXX, 
(i.) As to its meaning we have two facts to guide us, both of which have 
special value as to the early history and the signification of the term, 
(a) The man who introduces it and who freely employs it, is the one man 
among the apostles who can be said to be qualified alike by birth and 
breeding to use the term with intelligence. We know on the best authority 
that Paul alone among the apostles was born outside Palestine and in a 
city predominantly Greek yet ruled by Rome, where his father as well as 
himself were Roman citizens (Acts xvi. 37-38 ; xxii. 25-28). There 
is no battle which he fought more stoutly; therefore no victory 
he gained more complete than the victory which is represented by 
his making Greek the language of the new religion. His victory is here 
2 C 



386 eKK\r)<Jia AS USED IN HELLENISTIC GREEK 

fundamental signification was, stated in the classical sense, 
a society of the free and the fully privileged, or, stated in 
Hebrew terms, a people chosen or called of God, His elect; 
but while this fundamental emphasis on the people re- 
mained, it had a threefold extension or application: (i) a 
local or special, where it denoted a single society or assembly 
of redeemed men, the church of a given city, like Antioch,* 
or Corinth,t or Jerusalem, J or Ephesus,§ or the churches 

so thorough that only by the use of the historical imagination can the 
Aramaic birth and Semitic origin of the new religion be reconstituted. (j8) 
The fact, insufficiently recognized and appreciated, that the only writer in 
the New Testament who can be justly accused of having written a double 
history — a history which concerns equally Jesus and His apostles — is also its 
one writer who is a born Greek, and tells us that he has used and faithfully 
followed his notes (Luke i. 1-4). He is, besides, the only writer in the New 
Testament who uses €KK\r]aia in the strict classical sense (Acts xix. 39, 41) 
He has, too, sympathy and affinity with Paul. And yet while he, a born 
Greek, never puts the word eKK\r](Tia into the mouth of Jesus, or any of 
His circle, he rarely allows an apostle to appear in his later History with- 
out causing him to use the term. As a simple matter of fact while the 
Gospel according to Luke has no single reference to the church, either in 
the words of Jesus or in other words spoken by those ranged alongside 
Him, without the Acts of the Apostles the term would be without any 
history in the New Testament. The book has in all twenty-three references 
to the church. These include the epoch-making reference in Chapter xx. 
to the church of God. And Luke is true to historical truth in so doing, 
though not to historical truth alone, for the very reason that commended 
" kingdom " to the Jew, viz. the way it emphasized the superiority of 
the one to the many, made the term offensive to the Greek; and the 
reason that commended e/c/c\?7<rta to the Greek, the emphasis it threw 
upon the dignity of man as man, made it abhorrent to the Jew. (ii.) While 
its prevalence in the LXX. explains its prevalence in communities so 
largely composed of Jews with their ancestral passion for tradition as were 
the early Christian churches ; yet it cannot be put down to this cause alone. 
There were special reasons for its prevalence in the Greek and Gentile mind 
which ^tood opposed to the Jewish, especially in the terms the Jews most 
liked as rooted in the Hebrew scriptures and the customs they consecrated. 
Hence Acts is excellent as showing how the Greek clung to terms like 
€KK\rj(ria, were it only because they denoted ideas offensive to the Jew 
but agreeable to the Gentile. And in Hebrews, which is more than either 
the first or the most eloquent treatise in Christian theology, there are only 
two references to the iKKXrjaia, ii. 12, xii. 23. In the former case the term 
is used as in the LXX. 

* Acts xi. 26; xiii. i ; xv. 3. f xi. 22. 

+ I Cor. i. 2 ; 2 Cor. i. i. § Acts xx. 17; Rev. ii. i. 



IN THE N. T. HAS A THREEFOLD EXTENSION 387 

within a given region, like Syria and Cilicia,* Galatia,t or 
Asia.J (ii) A collective or general notion, the multitude of 
saints who live anywhere or at any time, whether viewed as 
the unity which makes known to principalities and powers 
in heavenly places the manifold wisdom of God ; § or as 
the community of Christians, the multitude of saints, 1 1 or 
as the church of God in distinction from the synagogues of 
the Jews.^ (iii) A universal sense, the redeemed of every 
age and race, the church of God which He hath purchased 
with His own blood, the body whose head is Christ and 
whose several members are His saints, whether these saints 
live in the visible or invisible world.** 

4. The term with all these rich and ancient associations, 
whether Semitic or Gentile, Hebrew or Hellenic, formed, 
as it were, to the hand, the evangelist used to trans- 
late the idea and express the mind of Christ. Wellhausen 
says,tt *'the Aramaic original k'nischta denoted the Jew- 
ish as well as the Christian community. The Palestinian 
Christians have retained it, never distinguishing the church 
from the synagogue; 'edta' is not Palestinian, but Syrian. 
The Syrians give *edta' for the Christian, and 'k'nuschta' 
for the Jews." The distinction is neither old nor obvious; 
yet we cannot clearly enough either conceive or insist on 
the fact that the Greek word used was not Christ's, 
though it may have expressed a specific Christian idea. 

* Acts XV. 41. f Gal. i. 2. 

I Rev. i. 4. This sense may best be expressed by the modern "con- 
gregation," the " commonalty," the " community," or any term that 
throws emphasis on the men who constitute an immortal society. 
I Cor. xi. 18; xiv. 4 ; Matt, xviii. 1 7. 

§ Eph. iii. 10. II I Cor. xiv. 33 ; Rom. xvi. 4. 

^ I Cor. i. 2; X. 32; xi. 22; xv. 9; Gal. i. 13. 

** Acts XX. 28 ; Col. i. 18 ; i Cor. xii. 28 ; Eph. i. 22 ; iii. 21 ; iv. 23-25 ; 
22-29, 32. 
f -f In his Das Evangelium Matthaei, in loc. 



IDEA OF THE CHURCH BEGINS WITH CHRIST. 

The idea, though not the term, of the church starts 
with Him, and His mind is at once fontal and prospective ; 
and the word itself is interpretative and retrospective. 
What it signified can be in some small measure per- 
ceived, (i) Its emphasis fell upon the subjects which were 
to the Greek, free men ; to the Hebrew, holy men ; to the 
Christian, redeemed men. It was therefore men in any case 
that were denoted, whether emancipated from sin, consti- 
tuted unto holiness, or placed under the reign and supreme 
authority of Christ, (ii) They were not left standing as 
units in isolation, but were organized into a unity, formed 
into an ordered society, which conditioned their freedom, 
defined their duties, guarded and guaranteed their rights, 
(iii) While Christ's was the ultimate authority or the 
sovereign power which ruled the piass, each eKKkr^cria^ 
ultimate in its own province, was the curious compound 
of legislative, judicial, and administrative functions which 
the Greek knew how to combine, yet none knew better 
than he that the eKKXrjo-ia was but an expedient for realizing 
a freedom which was greater than any agency needed to 
secure it. Hence (iv) each iKKXrjaCa or society was a consti- 
tuted order, and existed for no other purpose than to realize a 
will which meant good to all, which was evolved from within, 
not imposed from without. 1 1 is characteristic of the evan- 
gelist Matthew that in the whole range of the Greek tongue, 
whether in its classical form or Hellenistic variety, no word 
could have been selected so free from the taint of sacer- 
dotalism, or so significant of a sane and reasonable, yet 
ordered manhood grouped in a society, which yet was con- 
ceived as the ultimate authority which enabled a city or 
state to make and administer its own laws. 



HOW OUGHT eK/c\r)(TLa TO BE TRANSLATED? 389 



IV 

I. But if the term be so eminently Greek, alike in its 
signification and connotation, how, then, ought it to 
be translated ? The late Professor Hort, who here, un- 
consciously, imitated Luther's Heilig christlich Volk, pro- 
poses My Israel as a translation, which has most manifest 
advantages. It emphasizes the cardinal point, the people 
or the persons who constitute the material Christ builds 
into His church ; and sees in them the power which alone 
can make and interpret the duties by which the society must 
live. But it has one invincible defect; it is too purely 
Hebraistic to express an idea which has Hellenic as well as 
Hebrew elements. Hort therefore suggested that it might 
perhaps have been best to leave the Greek term untrans- 
lated ; and this is good, for it would have allowed the Greek 
associations of the free city and its free citizens to dwell 
in the mind together with the Hebrew associations of the 
holy man and the elect people governed by God. The 
two elements, Greek and Hebrew, had in the society 
the term denoted first blended and then rounded them- 
selves into a distinct and definite idea. And there is 
such subtle life or force in a word as may enable it to make 
and shape and rule minds which know nothing of its his- 
tory. This is a point which the term ''person" well 
illustrates. The least instructed man does not confuse 
"person" with ''individual." He may not know how 
or why the terms differ, but he does know that 
they so differ that while he may correctly speak of 
God as a "person," he cannot name Him an "indi- 
vidual," though out of the confusion of "three indi- 



390 THE ENGLISH WORD " CHURCH " A BAD RENDERING 

viduals" with ''three persons," some of the gravest though 
silliest objections to the doctrine of the Trinity have 
come. 

2. Now, our English word "church" as a rendering of 
iicK\7)(TLa is doubly unfortunate, for while it fails both to 
represent and interpret the Greek original, its historical and 
conventional usage carry us ever farther away from both the 
Hellenic and the Hebrew minds and associations. It tries 
indeed to represent and even transliterate a Greek word, but 
a word less noble and less honourable in both its classical 
and biblical senses than iKKkr^ala. Its biblical source is 
a humble adjective which was used in the New Testa- 
ment to qualify or denote either the sacred day,* or the 
sacred supper,t as the Lord's ; while in its classical and con- 
ventional use it distinguished, among other things, the 
palace or the hall where the business of the State was trans- 
acted as royal or imperial or simply as Caesar's. Hence 
the term KvpuaKov, whence the English word ''church" is 
derived, had come by the fourth century to denote the 
house where the Lord's people met ; and then by a familiar 
process of change it was applied to the people as well as 
the place. The Latin nations illustrate the opposite pro- 
cess; their names for what we call the "church," which 
spring from eKKXrjo-La, originally emphasized the people as 
free and as legislative ; but, having been handled without 
due care, it designates here the place and there the polity, 
now a particular congregation, and now the universal so- 
ciety, whether of the converted or the baptized. 

3. But the ambiguity which history enables us to under- 
stand inheres like a sin of origin in all the forms our word 
has assumed in all the cognate tongues. In the German 

* Apoc. i. 10. 
t I Cor. xi. 20. 



BECAUSE DERIVED FROM GREEK KVpLUKOV 39I 

"kirche," in the Dutch '^kerk,"* in the Scandinavian 
"kerke," in the Scottish "kirk," which all seem like im- 
mediate yet abbreviated echoes of the original ; and in the 
English ''church," which looks like a sound too confused 
by distance to be quite intelligible — we have the mixed 
associations of /cvptaKov, now denoting the people from 
the place where they worship, and now substituting the 
place for the people. t Scholars, feeling how a term may 
hide a cardinal truth, have tried now to expel ''church" 
from our version, J and now to fill it with some 
of the majesty and meaning of the word it has 
superseded; but they have tried in vain. Terms 
which denote the people and do not connote the building, 
like "congregation," "society," or "community," have 
been proposed as verbal substitutes; phrases which are 
more descriptive than denominative, like "body of the 
faithful," or "assembly of the saints," or "God's elect," 
have been suggested as means of getting rid of late and 
baneful distinctions like those between clergy and laity, 
or priests and common folk ; but back the term has come, 
as if it had never been expelled, with all its old associations 
and confusions, or as if it had a prescriptive and indefeasible 
right to govern mind . By the ' ' church ' ' so used Christ Him- 
self has been held responsible for our deeds. His authority 
has been made to depend in a strange way upon the per- 

* While the general synod of the Dutch Reformed Church in 1866 
retained "kerk" as the name of the national institution, in the transla- 
tion of the New Testament it approved the ordinary synonym for 
"church," i.e. gemeente = gemeinde, Ger. =" congregation " in English. 
The name thus recognizes the justice of the criticism in the text and throws 
the emphasis on the people. 

f Isaac Watts in his Logic gives its varied meanings thus: "The 
Church is a religious assembly, or the large fine building where it meets, 
or a synod of bishops or Presbyters, or the Pope and a general council." 

I V. supra, 145 n. 



392 CHRIST AS FOUNDATION, ARCHITECT, AND BUILDER. 

versities of human error, the oddities of human devotion, 
and the terms in which men confess their beliefs. Earth 
loves to hear Heaven endorse its judgments; and nowhere 
has the desire of man to get God's will to confirm and 
sanction his choice, rather than compel his will to obey 
God's, been more vigorously expressed than in the way he 
has filled this great idea with the dreams and the presump- 
tions of his own imagination. 



I. But more significant than either the constituents of 
the church or the Peter who is their type, is the Person who 
is its foundation, architect, and builder, all in one. The 
varied forms under which His action is expressed are most 
impressive, (i) The Messianic idea and the Sonship which 
Peter has j ust confessed are the stable foundation upon which 
the church is to be built ; and while the substructure stands 
the superstructure cannot be shaken, (ii) He is the builder: 
"I will build." To be the builder is also to be the archi- 
tect; as the action and the energy to which the church 
owes its being are His, His is the design they realize; and 
His therefore the creative will which bids it be and become, 
grow and increase, (iii) What He builds He owns : "My 
church"; the materials used are the men He redeemed, 
and just as the world God made belongs to the God who 
made it, so He who built the church possesses the church 
He has built, (iv) His church will be as immortal as Him- 
self ; for since His action can never cease, its continuance 
will be for ever; and so against it "the gates of Hades 
shall not prevail." * In the midst of time it is conscious of 

* Cf. Ps. ix. 13 ; Ixii. 18. Wellhausen says, in loc. that " the Gates of Hell " 
are symbolic of "the greatest danger." This is better than the idea that "the 
gates " which protect the city are symbolic of law and order. 



CONSTITUENTS OF THE CHURCH SAVIOUR AND SAVED 393 

His eternity, which means its own immortal being, and so 
it fears neither death nor the grave. ' ' The body of Christ ' ' 
can say, ''because He Hves I shall live also." What was 
true of Him is true of it : ''It is not possible that it should 
be holden of death." 

2. On the basis of this exposition we must now attempt 
to build up a positive doctrine of the church. The point 
from which we can best start is the conclusion we have 
reached in the course of our historical discussions. The 
idea of the church once lived in the mind of Christ, and has 
unfolded itself in the history of His people. We may sum- 
marize the idea thus : — The constituent elements of the 
church are two : the Saviour who saves that He may govern, 
and the men who are saved in order that they may be 
governed. These are essential, all else is accidental — 
either machinery man has made, or fashions his devotion 
has followed, or customs time has formed, or policies, 
stratagems, orders, rules — copied perhaps from the pomp 
and circumstance of States or organized by the church itself 
to meet some moment of struggle and strain ; but as such 
they belong neither to its esse nor to its bene esse. We 
too often forget that the essence of the sect is the accident 
of the church. What is necessary to the being of the one is 
no note of the other nor even a condition of its well-being- 
The essence of the church lies in the Saviour who reigns 
and the people He governs. Where He is, there is His 
church ; and where He reigns, there His people are. 



VI 

I. We have, then, the Saviour who saves. Two things, 
indeed, fill me with astonishment, (i) The supreme con- 
fidence — serene, calm, as becomes One who possesses an 



394 



THE CHURCH IS AS CHRIST IS. 



energy too absolute to be disturbed — of Him who said, 
''I will build." And (ii) the material which He was to use 
in the building. And these two spring from one root, 
and mean the same thing. The confidence is in Himself, and 
the material is of a kind that, while it becomes Him to use it, 
was such that the great empire builders would have turned 
from the same material with scorn. What indeed would 
have caused them to despair filled Jesus with hope, which 
proved His divine originality. For He was not the first 
person who had in His mind formed an ideal society. Cen- 
turies before Him Buddha had lived in India, where he had 
dreamed of a state of elect men, separated from the world, 
shut up to celibacy, made to live as those who held beatitude 
to be loss of conscious and active being. His dream was 
marred as it was marked by two things: (i) It was ascetic 
and antisocial, and by inexorable consequence its victory 
was the death of progress. For it made a complete separa- 
tion of the initiated disciple from the world and the duties 
that most ameliorate its hard and painful lot. And (ii) it 
was an estimate of life that was the child of despair — 
hatred of being rather than a love of men. There is an in- 
finite difference between pity for human suffering and love 
for human souls. Never has the pity for human suffering 
been more nobly expressed than in Buddha; but only in 
Christ have we the consuming, passionate, saving love of 
souls. We may so pity suffering that we hate life, for in liv- 
ing men must endure pain ; but if we love souls, then we hate 
sin, we hate sorrow, we hate whatever adds to the element 
of life the ingredient of pain. In Christ we have love of 
man direct, immediate, face to face, and this makes the 
material he employs in the building of his church. He is 
thus penetrated and possessed by the passion to save. 
As many centuries before Christ as Buddha, Confucius 



INDIAN, CHINESE, AND GREEK SAGES 395 

had lived in China, and had said — even as later Western 
men said — that the proper way to govern a state was for 
sages to be the counsellors of kings and for kings to be the 
pupils of the sages, forgetting the fact which is stranger 
than fiction, that the sagest man in the theory of the state 
may be the unwisest man in statecraft. And centuries 
also before Christ Greece was wealthy in thinkers who 
laboured to construct the ideal of a perfect state, though 
they loved their own Greek cities too well to imagine that 
a better polity than they suggested or embodied was 
either possible to men or actual among them. Plato's 
Republic and his Laws, the dreams, respectively, of his 
manhood and of his less hopeful age, embodied the theory 
of the Greek city. In the ideal of his splendid manhood 
the king was to be a philosopher, and the philosopher 
a king, which was but the Confucian doctrine stated in 
a Greek form. He forgot how disputatious philosophers 
could be; how prone they were to accentuate differences 
and to argue till harmony became disagreement. And 
the disagreements of philosophers are not royal qualities 
or of a kind victory can decide. Men were to be educated 
till their unstable humanity was got out of them. Religion 
or mythology was to be manipulated till it ceased to create 
fear and made the least healthful appeal to the imagination. 
Property was to be common . Families were to be abolished , 
and the home was to become an affair of the state. Wives 
were to be common, and the children were to belong to 
the community rather than to their own parents. All this 
Plato dreamed, and much more than this; but it happily 
remains a dream, studied by the educated as an ideal des- 
tined never to become a reality, and certain, were it ever 
realized, to make a world worse than the actual. In his less 
hopeful age Plato thought much of the abstract, and imag- 



396 MEN WHO MAKE LITERATURE DIFFER 

ined it was more potent than the concrete ; speculated more 
concerning the laws that govern man and less concerning the 
man they govern. And after him came many a dreamer, 
like Dante, who thought of a monarchy where justice was 
to reign and the king, though able to do wrong, was so to do 
right as to secure the freedom of each and the equality 
of all; or like Thomas More, who conceived his Utopia 
as a state without local habitation or any name, which 
no hands had built and where mortal men might worship 
God uncoerced and unafraid ; or like Bacon, who imagined 
his Atlantis as an island in the great ocean where men 
lived according to laws which embodied a divine ideal; 
or like Harington and Milton and Algernon Sidney, who 
all built commonwealths of the mind, free states where 
man could think his noblest and become his best. But 
these men were one and all dreamers; they made litera- 
ture, but not men; they taught us to imagine a happier 
state and showed us the conditions which, by making a 
better society possible, might make a higher humanity 
actual. We are grateful to these dreamers for their dreams, 
but they only serve to measure the immense distance be- 
tween the good which genius may conceive and the good 
which God alone can produce or achieve. And it has 
need to be good of God's production; man is so poor as 
material to be built into a stable society. 

2. Jesus, then, was no dreamer of literary ideals, which 
men in later ages could amuse and educate themselves by 
discussing. He was a veritable Creator, or one who willed 
to create and the creation happened, who designed to save 
man and man was saved. He said: ''Know Me, and 
through Me know the Father" ; and men, when they knew 
as He bade them, rose up changed men. The heavens 
above them ceased to be vacant, and from out the stars 



FROM MEN WHO MAKE MEN 397 

there looked down the myriad eyes of a God who said: 
"I am the Father of all men; and since all men are My 
sons, all must be brothers." 

And what have the results been? We may say noble, 
magnificent, such as no one could have imagined. Man 
ceased to be thrown in the amphitheatre to the wild beasts 
or to be an article of commerce to men; women ceased 
to be an object of lust; humanity became a unity, stood 
up and marched as to a divine music, all its units being 
penetrated by the divine mind in order to the fulfilment 
of the divine purpose. 

3. Let us think, not in classes or types, nor, as the say- 
ing is, *'in continents," which may be a mode of 
thought both poor and mean ; but in terms of man, though 
as massed in continents, accumulated in nations. In 
Europe more than two hundred millions of men live who 
have the same faith as ourselves, though disguised in varied 
forms and under many names. In America, in our colonies, 
and at home one hundred and forty millions of men use 
our tongue. And what constitutes the very heart and 
spirit of all these peoples ? Can we doubt that it is Christ 
and His message ? Take as a type out of the great multi- 
tude our own London — the immensest, most populous, 
richest, poorest, the most ubiquitous city in the world; 
her energies run to the uttermost parts of the earth; her 
eyes are everywhere. Where wealth is to be found, there 
some of her myriad hands are groping; where money 
is wanted, there some one or several of her myriad 
money-lenders are prepared to offer it for loan or sale; 
wherever man is, there she is, and she ever seeks to draw 
men to herself from all parts of the globe, to enlarge, to 
enrich, and to impoverish. What now stands in our great 
London for all that is ameliorating, progressive, orderly, 



398 THE MODERN CITY: LONDON AS AN EPITOME 

potent in good ? Let any stranger come up her ancient 
river, and see how high, overtopping all other towers 
and palaces, rises the lofty dome of St. Paul's. He asks: 
''Is it under this dome that your men coin their money? 
Is it from that lordly peak they look for markets 
throughout the world?" And the answer is: "Nay! 
There amidst all their warehouses, reigning over 
all their daily interests, stands the symbol of their 
faith!" Higher up the river lie the ashes of our 
most illustrious dead, shadowed by the Cross and 
consecrated by the name of the Crucified. Why do the 
ashes lie there but to express the faith of our people as 
the most sacred thing our people has? They enshrine 
the names they love in the faith they hold. Pass through 
the streets, and mark how, in places where they are needed, 
huge hospitals rise. There are nurses in the crowded 
ward where lie the suffering and the sick, moving with a 
soft foot, and speaking with the gentle voice, so excellent 
a thing in woman, to heal and to help the suffering. There 
the knife of the surgeon has ceased from its cruel power 
of slaying, and turned into a beneficent minister of health 
and life; there the physician seeks to battle with grim 
disease and make the sound body for the sound mind to 
dwell in. Pass on, and you will see in almost every street, 
even the most sordid, a building consecrated to sacred use; 
where, close beside it, lives a man of God amid men of man- 
kind given up to the service of men, with the message meant 
for their healing, with a word meant for their saving. And 
if our stranger were to come in the green month of May, 
when all nature is fragrant and the country is winsome, 
what would he find ? Gathered in the great city hosts of 
men who tell of the Scriptures translated into every lan- 
guage men speak, and circulated in every inhabited land. 



OF ENGLAND: ITS MEANING AND MESSAGE 399 

And what is the reason? Because they publish the name 
of Jesus and perpetuate His teaching. Men come, and 
there are books to be read, and social societies to print 
and to disperse them; there are societies to shelter the 
innocent, prosecute the guilty, to help the poor, to ame- 
liorate the lot of the sad ; societies designed to heal every 
ill flesh is heir to, to breathe health into sickness, to create 
purity in guilt, to surround helpless infancy with the 
strong hands of gracious protection. And if you ask 
what is the mainspring of all these, giving them purpose 
and power, what man dare say other than this, "They are 
the creation of the Jesus who preached the Gospel in Galilee, 
backed by the men who preach His Gospel in England 
to-day." 

4. Have I spoken of London in terms that may seem ex- 
travagant, though they can only so seem to such as do not 
know her? There is, indeed, a dark side to all the bright- 
ness. Eastward and southward lives squalor — miles upon 
miles of squalor, and hunger and suppressed passion, and 
possible eruption of things terrible and chaotic. And west- 
ward, lined indeed with lanes where live the unclean and the 
gross, lie selfivshness and pride and exclusiveness, though with 
many a noble strain here and there and many a high pur- 
pose within it. In the night season, and often in the day, 
does not sin walk the streets, deprave the youth, lay hold 
upon our spirits, bind us, as it were, more and more in the 
chains from which Christ was born to set us free ? Do not 
think that we can do our duty afar if we forget it at home ! 
Nor can duty be neglected without the neglect affecting 
the whole man. We have therefore here simply to note how 
greed and envy and the power of mischief have grown. We 
can see how a man who has his rum or his spirits to sell 
sells them to the lower races, which he kills by the sale ! Or 



400 ENGLAND'S CONCERN FOR THE PEOPLE. 

how men greedy for diamonds, and with an unholy hunger 
for the land which conceals gold and diamonds, make short 
work of the native that owns the land, then some master 
comes who degrades him into a slave. Or how men learn to 
sin in our great cities, and carry their base, debauching sin 
amongst the simple peoples they waste and ruin. Or how 
our literature, subtle, sceptical, now and then irrational in 
its very rationality, penetrates in amongst the people we are 
seeking to convert and to hold, and makes them turn in 
scorn upon the man that preaches, as if all England thought 
and believed as do the men who make our letters. Yes, 
there is in England a conscience which insists upon the 
weaker race being kindly nursed, loved, and tended — a 
conscience which bids us say to the trader in things evil, 
''Pause ere you blight." Our giant's might is still re- 
strained, and we are not allowed to use it as a giant with 
a giant's resistless and regardless energy. It is bound in 
chains; and as far as the law can restrain we restrain the 
might to do harm. Christian England is not free to act as 
acts the reckless people; she is bound by the law of the 
Kingdom, to establish which Christ came. 



VII 

I . Christ then is the cause of the quality of His religion ; 
all the grace which the church possesses through Him she 
possesses that she may distribute. He, in effect, says: 
"Time is eternity; let eternity fill time. Thou art, O 
man, immortal, and in every moment of thy being 
be immortal man." A new dignity came to humble 
individuals, the lowliest is exalted, the proudest is 
abased ; for where eternity had swallowed up time 
what could mortals do but feel their mean estate? 



THE METHOD OF JESUS IN FOUNDING HIS CHURCH 40I 

New ideals took possession of the individual and quick- 
ened the organization of the race. Humanity had breathed 
into it the breath of life, but the method was so simple 
that it seemed as if any one might have devised it, yet 
so radical and potent that without the energy of God the 
change could not have been. Yet its apparent simplicity 
must not be allowed to conceal the unique originality of 
the method. Jesus, when founding His church, took no 
man out of society; He left him where he stood, but He 
changed the man and through him the society. He with- 
drew no father from his family, no wife from her husband, 
no daughter from her mother, no citizen from the state, no 
artisan from his craft, no physician from his practice, or 
lawyer from his clients. He left them there, but, changing 
the men, He changed all, the circumstances through the 
man, not the man through the circumstances. It was a 
divine achievement — a new creation we may call it — but 
not a dream. For it is the most colossal reality of history. 
The church has stood and has worked for ages without 
knowing decrepitude or decay. It has prevailed against 
the gates of Hades, though they at first gaped to devour 
it. 

2. But there are many who will say : *'Ah! this idea of 
the church, as simply made up of Christ and His people, 
is far too simple to be true, too bodiless to be efficient, 
too impalpable to be real. A church to be actual must be 
organized, possessed of officers with divine rights, with an 
authority which can make and administer laws higher than 
those of any state, with severer sanctions because a sterner 
will to enforce. But what is the worth of sanctity apart 
from effectual means of enforcement ? Without a legal and 
political framework, how can the church live and govern, 
guide and legislate, for a being as refractory as man?" 

2D 



402 THE SECRET OF NATURE AND OF JESUS. 

The church proves history to be the pathway of God; 
history can never prove the church to be divine. She 
Hves above all truth of fact. But look at nature, and 
let us ask, What are the constituents of her order and 
beauty and continuance ? Once men thought : — the 
earth a flat plain, with heaven as a roof in which the sun 
shone by day and where the moon and stars came out in 
the darkness; they fancied the sea and the rivers to be 
intended to keep the peoples at peace by keeping them 
apart, and the land to be a stable centre round which all 
things revolved. But what has been the struggle of 
modern knowledge? Has it not been to escape from this 
mocking idea of a universe which is limited to earth, and to 
discover both the range and the reality of existence or what 
actually is? And has it not found the ultimate constitu- 
ents of all this fair and ordered cosmos in atoms, individual, 
distinct, indestructible, each having its own being, its own 
properties, its own history, its own modes of action, though 
all are dommated, governed, and harmonized by a supreme 
law? Before the imagination of the physicist there rises 
the vision of a universe illimitable, infinite, though without 
centre, a circumference made up of an infinity of separate 
particles, each constant in essence, invariable in quality, 
uniform in quantity, yet all, while mutable in form, im- 
mutable as factors of change, exercising in their collective 
being the inexhaustible energy which creates the furniture 
of earth and sky, though they are themselves the very 
furniture we see and hear and handle. 

Now, in the church there are but two constituents : (i) the 
Person who can attract, control, command ; (ii) the persons 
who can be attracted, controlled, commanded ; though much 
may be said for a third, the medium through which the 
Supreme Person works and in which the subordinate persons 



CHRIST AS A PERSON HEALS PERSONS 403 

live. But this third element, the medium, is only a subjec- 
tive necessity of thought, which is, objectively, but the form, 
whether we name it space or time, that permits the other 
two to meet and mingle, to act and react upon each other. 
As every atom is a centre of force, so every person is a 
home of myriad energies; and as atom can act on atom, 
so person on person, the action being ever reciprocal and 
transmissible. As Schelling said, the personal can alone 
heal the personal ; and so otherwise than through man it is 
impossible to reach men. What does not enter humanity 
as human must stay for ever outside ; what has no affinity 
with the soul, what speaks to it in an alien tongue concern- 
ing alien things, must remain a foreigner on its hearth, and 
a stranger to its thought. Hence God had to become man 
to reach men ; only as a person could Christ reach persons, 
and out of the persons He reached He constituted His 
church that He might penetrate the whole race and re- 
make mankind from within. He thus took personality that 
He might the better communicate the recreative energies 
of God; and here we have, in brief, the meaning of the 
incarnation, which ceases to be a mystery the moment its 
purpose is perceived. The men who for the time being 
embody God's recreative energies constitute His church, 
which as the vehicle of His life continuously transmits 
what it has received from Him. 



vni 

I. It is the men composing the church who give to it 
the outward appearance which is seen of men; it seems 
as they are. Of the two forces which form the church 
Christ is the creative and men the created. Both, 



404 

indeed, are active, for he who exhibits must act as well as 
He who gives ; but the creative is the fountain and source 
of all the derived or created activity. While the energy, 
then, is Christ's, the forms it assumes are as varied and 
multitudinous as the persons who compOvSe His church. 
To try to compel His energies to flow in any single channel 
which man has made is, as it were, instead of leaving nature 
to speak in her own language, to attempt to force her to 
use some little local dialect of our own. It may be easier 
to understand our own dialect than to learn and interpret 
her larger speech; but our dialect is the tongue of our 
tribe, while her speech is the language of man. People may 
speak to us in the dialect of their tribe of apostolic de- 
scent or inalienable orders ; but the only apostolic descent 
we can recognize is the vehicle which brings to us 
the life of Him who died. If that life has come 
to us through many an obscure man and many a humble 
woman on whom no episcopal or any sacerdotal hand was 
ever laid — as was this writer's case, he, at least, can 
never forget the part played by his own mother in bringing 
the life of God to his soul — how can we regard apostolic 
descent as the distinction or the attribute of the episcopal 
or the priestly race alone ? Is it true that all the piety of the 
church has been their direct bestowment? or that they 
can claim to have formed all the saints, heroes, or martyrs 
who have for Christ's sake or His church's lived, suffered, 
or died ? But if, as they well know, any such claim would 
be preposterous, what is the good of the theory ? To make 
what is not necessary to the higher saintliness, or the purer 
devotion of the soul, essential to the being and the well- 
being of the church, is but to make reason and truth, which 
are of God, alike ridiculous. It is, besides, to set argument 
the thankless task of proving an historical accident or a 



AS ALL CHRISTIAN MEN ATTEST 405 

trivial circumstance, a matter of absolute validity and in- 
herent worth. 

2. And here we can appeal to history with confidence: 
goodness has not been the attribute of any sect or section 
of ecclesiastical men; the apostolic life has been realized 
by multitudes who have stood or been made to stand out- 
side the so-called apostolic tradition, and who have been 
saintly if not sainted and canonized men. We need not go 
back to the apostolic age, that would make our list too long — 
the habit of the official * ' good man ' ' to recognize no goodness 
which differs in type from his own is inveterate — but rather 
let us start lower down. We begin, then, with a man born 
in heathenism — where he had been taught to regard the 
Christian religion as ridiculous, as a folly to be laughed at 
— about 1 60, and he died a Christian about 240* He bears 
the name of Tertullian.f He is an orator, jurist, divine, 
apologist, who formulates the doctrine of tradition, elabo- 
rates the theories of the creation and soul of man, whether 
he be conceived according to the East as an individual, or 
according to the West as our collective humanity, whether 
its sin be thought of as the sin of a person or a race, the 

* The dates are here uncertain, curiously so, especially in the case of 
one so free in his communications about himself and others. Thus, in 
the matter of his conversion, between the 185 of Cave (i. 56) and the 
date of Pusey in the Oxford translation of Tertullian's opera (Introduction, 
i. 2), 196, there is a difference of eleven years; the date of his apostasy 
to Montanism, Cave fixes at 199, Pusej- at 201, so that in the one case he 
was fourteen years, in the other but five in Catholicism (cf. Apolog., 
c. 18). 

f Jerome, De Viris Illustr., c. 53, Jerome simply says that TertulHan 
lived to "a great age," sharing all its decrepitude. This is not the only 
piece of information we owe to Jerome. He tells us that Tertullian was 
but a Presbyter ; that he was driven out of the church by the envy of the 
clergy ; that he was a principal Latin writer ; that he lived in Carthage ; 
and that his father was either a "pro-consul or centurion." We owe 
him, besides, the anecdote as to Cyprian calling Tertullian his "master," 
and never passing a day without reading him. 



4o6 THE TRUTH ATTESTED BY TERTULLIAN AND 

sin we know as personal or as original; he builds up the 
notion of a canon or rule of faith, whether understood 
of the church or the Scriptures. He introduces philo- 
sophical jurisprudence into theology, coins more terms 
that become technical and influential in Western Christian 
thought than any other Father. He is honoured and 
revered, whether as Father or as theologian,* as a man 
who esteems equally integrity of soul and veracity of 
speech. Origen, in the accident of his birth, was more 
highly favoured than TertuUian; he was born about 185 
of Christian parents. . He died about 254 — far from his 
native Alexandria, ascetic, recluse, sage, scholar, a master 
thinker and the most blameless vSpirit of his time; gentlest 
of men, he was yet too unyielding to bend before perse- 
cution; learned, he was too conscientious to profess know- 
ledge where he knew himself ignorant; an allegorist in 
interpretation, he yet so loved the letter that he imposed 
the ethics of the Gospel upon himself in their most literal 
sense ; as a critic faithful to the religion which had trained 
him and to the place he had been educated in, he yet stood 
true to the method and to the ideas of God and the word 
of Pantsenus and of Clement, turning what they had taught 
him against a Greek like Celsus; as a speculative genius 
he built the faith he believed in into a system. f These 
two men were too good to be canonized; no church has 
called them saints; each has left them outside its apostolic 
order and apostolic descent. Yet Christ, who recognizes 

* See among others Renan, who speaks of Tertullian's eminence, 
caUing him "a great writer," yet charges him with "bad taste" {Marc- 
Aurele, p. 456). 

•f On the irepl apx^v I cannot trust myself to speak. The first sys- 
tematic treatise still remains the most daring, though its audacities axe 
more those of childhood than of manhood. But the man who first broke 
ground here is a courageous man. 



407 

genuine merit everywhere, acted through them, and still 
acts through them. 

About one hundred years after the death of Origen, 
in 353, a man was born who was destined to become a 
great Father of the church, a bishop and a saint, the most 
potent theologian of the West, whose antecedents were 
both Pauline and neo-Platonic, for in his most character- 
istic books sentences, nay, whole paragraphs, are taken 
bodily from Plotinus.* Augustine was a strong ecclesiastic, 
and much was forgiven him on this account ; he was full of 
apologetic fervour, for had he not built the city of God and 
vindicated His truth against the heathen and the heretic ? 
The twin pillars of his orthodoxy were the sovereignty of 
God and the depravity of man; the former he conceived 
as the sole causality of God in nature and in grace — the 
one because the other; the latter he construed through 
the freedom he had vindicated against the Manichean, 
and the bondage through sin and to it which he had vindi- 
cated against the Pelagian. The two he had connected 
and justified by a doctrine of conversion which made faith 
the gift of God, and the depraved man, if converted, the 
man best able to conceive and believe in the divine sov- 
ereignty. With these ideas he conjoined a notion, based 
on the sole causality of God, which in its native 
harshness and simplicity is severer than anything as- 
sociated with the name of Calvin. It takes a bad man 
to believe in the theology of Augustine, especially where 
it touches human depravity. The man who stands over 
against Augustine is Pelagius. He believed in freedom 
of the human will, in the excellency of human virtue, and 
in the honour it has before God, and ought to have within 

* The book referred to is that on which Augustine's fame as a Christian 
theologian mainly rests, the Confessions. 



4o8 CHRIST MORE CATHOLIC THAN THE ROMAN 

the church. His notions, whether of the will or virtue, 
whether of the church or of God, were strictly and logi- 
cally monkish, and so, though a heretic, Pelagius has as 
good a moral right to be sainted as Augustine, for his piety 
is as deep, his integrity as real, his devotion as little open 
to question. His theology was the more monkish, Augus- 
tine's the more philosophic and pagan, with sources rather 
neo-Platonic and stoic than biblical. Both were men 
Christ would have acknowledged ; though a society which 
claimed to be His church has canonized the one and anathe- 
matized the other as a heretic. 

We follow the same method and bid the Middle Ages 
supply us with our next example. Dante is driven from 
his Florentine home, and seeks a place where he could 
forget the city of his birth, of his loves and his hates, and 
where he himself could dwell in peace. But he finds that 
earth has for him no second Florence, and so he calls up 
a vision of the world invisible to redress the terrible sins 
and cruel wrongs of the visible. He shows us the shames, 
the agonies, the dire reminiscences, and the grim punish- 
ments of his many-cycled and deep hell; then guides us 
up the vast and holy mount of the Purgatorio ; and finally 
he leads by the gracious hands of the glorified Beatrix 
to the hill of the beatific vision whence we can see God. But 
we have another type of piety in Thomas a Kempis, a monk 
and saintly man, who in his soul broods over the divine 
example, forsakes and forgets the world ; and thinks man's 
chief end is to imitate Christ, though the Christ he would 
have us imitate is no longer the blithesome Jesus of Galilee, 
but a pale and suffering and sorrow-laden mediaeval monk. 
But who would say that Dante, the strenuous thinker and 
poet, doing battle for freedom, is not a saint as perfect as 
Thomas a Kempis ? 



OR THAN ANY WESTERN CHURCH • 409 

In the period of the Reformation Luther preaches of 
the Babylonish captivity of the church and the bondage 
of man's will ; while Erasmus advocates man's freedom 
that he may the better plead for his right to continue to 
make terms with error that distress may not come. But 
who would say that there was not as much room in the 
church ; or that Christ had not as much need for the sen- 
sitive and delicate, the timorous and temporizing Eras- 
mus as for the buoyant and boisterous Luther? In the 
same century Thomas More fears God too much to please 
his king, and goes to death, losing his head rather than ruin 
his conscience; while Thomas Cranmer, who had obeyed 
two sovereigns, and tried to obey a third, but failed, burns 
at the stake the right hand that had signed his re- 
cantation. But may we not say that Thomas Cranmer, 
with his burned right hand, is within the same ample fold 
that sheltered and enshielded Thomas More? Richard 
Hooker pleads for a church that is a commonwealth, and 
whose legitimate head was a sovereign ; Thomas Cartwright 
pleads for a church ruled by Christ and charged with the 
control of its own affairs — though the two never dreamed 
of raising the question, What is the church, officers or 
people, law and institution, or men? But both meet in 
their common loyalty to their invisible Head. John 
Hales might bid John Calvin good night at Dort, but 
it was only to wish him good morning when they met in 
heaven. John Milton and John Bunyan alike dreamed 
of an eternal city large and free enough to hold all the 
sinners of mankind whom grace had saved. Richard Bax- 
ter and George Fox wrestled and contended over ''steepled 
meeting-houses," but greater than the steepled meeting- 
house was the devotion they had in common to Him whom 
neither had seen, yet both loved. Jonathan Edwards 



4IO THE -CHURCH AS SOCIETY OF THE HOLY. 

speculated on high themes, and John Wesley achieved 
great things, though each despised the theology of the 
other; but deeper than their reciprocal contempt for 
their respective theologies was their enthusiasm for their 
common Saviour. And so, through all time, extending 
through all churches, realized in every one who believes 
— in some more and in others less, perhaps — there lives 
and penetrates the great church of Christ. 



IX 

But how does this universal society of the holy, built out 
of such mixed and flawed material as we call men, stand 
related to the multitudinous organizations which name 
themselves churches? Men say, "I believe in the visible 
church." I believe, indeed, in visible churches; but the 
invisible church I believe in is like the invisible God, a secret 
energy, universal and unbounded. The visible Catholic 
Church would be like a visible infinite, and what were a visi- 
ble infinite but infinity fettered with the limitations of fini- 
tude? We must conceive the divine society as free from 
the conditions of time and place, master in its own eternity 
and through that in our time ; and as standing in a divine 
order all its own, supreme, infallible, as becomes the church 
of Christ. 

I . We have to consider, then, the relation of the building 
Christ built to the material He used. This relation may be 
one of character, which is simple; or of polity, which is 
more complex. (i) The simpler, which concerns the rela- 
tion of all our visible churches to Christ's holy catholic and 
invisible church, (ii) The polity raises the question of the 
relations in which the organizations that man forms and 



THE PANORAMA OF HISTORICAL CHURCHES 41I 

administers stand to the great structure built of living 
stones formed by the will and act of Christ. 

I would not undervalue historical churches or their 
achievements, whether for particular states, for special 
peoples, or for humanity as a whole, though these things 
ever tend to coalesce. I never feel the greatness of Christ so 
much as when I face these churches and think He made 
them, and though they may fail of His service, yet, in spite 
of that failure. He still loves and still condescends to use 
and to bless them. A church constituted by accidents and 
emphasizing these accidents, will not fulfil its chief function, 
especially if it so prides itself on these as to forget the aims 
and ideals of the Christ who made it and who means to rule it. 
I know no greater panorama than the panorama of Christian 
churches organized and visible. In the East, stretching 
from the ^Egean up to the Arctic Sea, from the Baltic east- 
ward to the Pacific, reigns the old Grseco- Russian church. 
There it lives, proud of its patriarchal clergy, of its liturgy, 
written in the very tongue the apostles spoke, of its ab- 
horrence of the ''filioque," and all the institutions that 
came with it into the darksome west. Then at Rome there 
sits a church whose head is called infallible — which means 
his inability to confess that either he or his predecessors 
erred even where their errors are most manifest; it is, 
too, a church immense, distributed everywhere, which 
speaks all the tongues man uses, and, in spite of its own 
and its head's infallibility, though illustrated by an in- 
finity of errors and mistakes, it still continues to live and 
to be believed. In Germany there is a church which loves 
the Fatherland, and teaches it to love the dear God, and 
which provides many a scholar for the investigation of 
things sacred and for the enlightenment of Christendom. 
In England there is a historical church proud of its affini- 



412 THE RESTRICTION OF HUMILITY AND MAGNANIMITY 

ties with the Roman and the Greek — affinities which 
they are not so proud of or so prompt to recognize — dis- 
tinguished for its learning, its love of its stately homes, 
its ornate service, its high dignitaries, and its great posi- 
tion in history which belongs to its position in the 
State. In Switzerland, in Holland, in Scotland, there 
is a Presbyterian church, conscious of its high ideals, 
its orthodox faith, and its stern sons whose heroic 
virtues have shone in the arena of public and social 
life. In all English-speaking lands there are churches 
similar in character and quality, in faith and con- 
duct, though more varied in form and of a more 
independent spirit, facing the proud aristocracies of 
office and ritual in the faith of a prouder vocation in Christ 
Jesus. Now we dare not speak of these churches as sects, 
for each has felt in its own way and degree that it cannot 
part from man or lose its hold upon his immortal soul. 
But why are they and for what reason? They are, for 
Christ is, and the power they have lived in and exercised 
is power they owe to Him. The church could not have 
stood in Russia in the strength of only an imperial Czar, 
or of an abhorred ''filioque," nor, indeed, could it 
have lived at all without a divine Consoler to speak 
to the humble peasant, and even where the church 
repressed it has taught him to exercise his faith and to 
feed his spirit. The Roman church could not have 
endured, in spite of her sacraments and her priest- 
hood, her altars and her music, her splendid history 
and her spacious cathedrals, without the saints Christ 
made, without the martyrs she honours, without, not 
Mary the Virgin, but Mary's Son, who gives her all her dig- 
nity and all her grace. Nor could there ever have lived in 
the German Fatherland a church of science and of the spirit 



OF HIM WHO DWELLS IN ALL HUMANITY 413 

had it not been for the faith that came through Luther 
and the Gospel he preached of Christ's free grace. And 
what gives the Anglican church its power, its love for its 
orders, and its place in society, save the desire to make 
articulate what it conceives to be the truth which is in Christ 
Jesus? And what inspires all the Presbyterian and Inde- 
pendent churches, however they may be named and dis- 
tinguished; what creates within them a conscious unity; 
what fills them with a vivid jealousy for doctrine and a 
noble jealousy for life, and a divine passion for men, save 
their faith in the Christ who loved and loves men, who lives 
in them and seeks to bring them into a divine society? 
Churches fail when they emphasize their own accidents; 
they reign in triumph when they do His will and seek to 
accomplish His redemption. 

2 . From the Founder's relation of His church to the State 
and to history or to man, as well as to the names it bears, 
we may see the magnanimity of Christ. He consents to 
live in communities that call themselves or are called by 
such vain names as Presbyterian or Independent, Baptist 
or Methodist, Anglican or Lutheran, Papal or Russian 
churches, and with still greater humility He consents to 
dwell in proud communities which claim to be either im- 
perial, infallible, or apostolic. If there be laughter in 
Deity, must it not be at the follies of the men who think 
that they hold God in their custody and can distribute 
Him to whomsoever they* will? The last apostasy on 
our part is to be insolent to the humblest member of Christ's 
body; the highest and most condescending grace on His 
side is His consenting to abide in communities so lordly 
as to hold themselves aloof from the common duties of 
brotherhood. He reigns in and tolerates their very errors 
for the sake of the loving works they do. And yet how 



414 CHRIST'S AUTHORITY LIVES TO FAITH 

sad it must be when He who loves to see of the travail of 
His soul is forced to look upon the perfervid profanity of 
men who dared to put their time into His eternity ; to bind 
immensity to the small spot in space which they occupy; 
and to tie the holy and divine infinitude of grace to some 
doctrines of paltry and mortal man ! 



X 

I. We return, then, to the position:^ — Christ as su- 
preme is the absolute Sovereign of His own church. 
He reigns and governs; beside Him there is no second. 
Now here emerges one of those extraordinary features 
that makes His position and His action altogether sin- 
gular, and shows Him in His simple sublimity. If we ask 
any jurist or student of poHtical philosophy, What is the 
ultimate basis of authority in the State? he will tell us, 
*'It is the power of Hfe and death. Unless the chief of 
the State could at the demand of public justice cut off a 
man's head, it could not be the guardian of right. Not 
in vain therefore does the magistrate bear the sword." 
Alexander becomes a world's king because he has been 
a world's conqueror. The might of Caesar was in his 
legions. Napoleon may have ruled the army which he 
led to victory, by its love now of glory and now of plunder ; 
but it was the army that made him ruler of France and the 
master of Continental Europe. And what are our modern 
republics save ''demos " on the throne, with a will that must 
be obeyed, whoever may resist? For how did a man like 
Mohammed found his religious state? He founded it, 
said Kremer, by forming a federation of Arab tribes for the 
robbery and plunder of the world. He conquered in the 
might of a force based on the lust of wealth. Now here is 



AND DOES NOT REST ON FORCE 415 

a fact that must be reckoned with, for it is in singular 
opposition to all experience — the supremest and most 
enduring authority in time is an authority without physical 
force ; the authority is the Christ who bears no sword. He 
has no army. No multitudes of armed men march behind 
him with banners unfurled and with crosses on their breasts. 
Where men have unsheathed the sword in His name they 
may have left behind a solitude, and miscalled peace ; but 
the solitude has turned out a fruitful garden, only the seed 
sown in it has been dragon's teeth which have sprung up 
as warlike and ravening men. But Christ Himself has no 
sword ; he leads no bannered army ; He has no marshalled 
host behind Him, whom He has summoned into the battle- 
field; He lives to faith; He reigns in conscience; and 
there through centuries, when the Emperor was no Chris- 
tian, either as man or as emperor, through centuries when 
he may have become a Christian man without be- 
coming a Christian emperor — for our religion has suf- 
fered more from imperial protection than from imperial 
persecution — Christ has lived and reigned, the one Per- 
son in all time whose authority is absolute, yet without rest- 
ing on physical force. He holds men as the great law of 
gravitation holds the material universe, and they circle 
round Him, like the planets in their places, or like a sun in 
its sphere, where all is harmony because created by His 
almighty love. 

2. As the church He rules is His creation, it ought to 
be as He is. As Christ is the incarnation of God, the church 
ought to be the incarnation of Christ. Every phrase used 
of Him as the eternal Son of the Father ought to be 
capable of application to the church as His incorporated 
spirit. If the matter be so understood, then the church 
ought to be the brightness of His glory, and the express 



41 6 THE FUNCTIONS OF CHRIST IN HIS ^HURCH. 

image of His person, ought to seek to accomplish the things 
He most desires, to beseech man with His many-toned voice 
to be reconciled to God ; and to act as His miUion-fold hands 
to build up an ideal society among men. Now the church 
ought to incarnate Christ in two main respects : as regards 
functions, and as regards acts. 

XI 

The functions, which are three, were known of old as 
those of priest, prophet, and king. 



I . The priesthood belongs to the collective society, to the 
men who have been taken into the fellowship of His death. 
To argue that it may be delegated to an official class is to 
show a distressing lack of insight into the heart of the truth. 
A function which belongs to a body as a common and col- 
lective whole may be distributed under two forms, either 
{a) by every member, simply by virtue of his belonging to 
the body corporate, having the power or the right to exercise 
its special and peculiar functions ; or (^) by a deliberate and 
collective vote the society may authorize certain persons 
to act in its name, and to fulfil vicariously its functions. 
The first form is too essential to membership and inseparable 
from it to be conceived or represented as delegation to any 
order or class of officers; what belongs of right and not 
simply of choice to the body neither the body as a whole 
nor any of its parts can surrender, just as a living man 
cannot surrender life and still remain alive. The second 
form is even more impossible of fulfilment; for the society 
as a whole has never met and never voted, and so has 
never attempted to carry through any such delegation of 



THE PRIESTHOOD OF THE CHURCH IS AS CHRIST IS 417 

function as is here implied. Nor could it even if it had 
SO willed. Certain things can and certain things cannot 
be delegated. Jesus might send forth apostles to be His 
witnesses, and to preach in His name ; but He never could 
have commissioned any one to endure His sufferings or 
undergo His passion for Him. The essential part of His 
work He Himself must do. He in His own person must die, 
in order that men might be redeemed. Without Him the 
death could have had no merit, and without its merit there 
could have been no efficacious sacrifice. In a similar sense 
and way, then, the priesthood of the church is undelegable; 
it is so of the essence of the body that without it the body 
could not be. This inseparability of the priestly function 
from its essence signifies that the church continues Christ's 
work; and is bound to become, as it were, a colossal per- 
sonality which lives for the realization of His ideals. Stand- 
ing as Mediator between God and man, bearing the guilty 
in its heart, and suffering daily for their sins, yet ever un- 
veiling the face of the Father, and distributing His grace 
to man who would otherwise perish. 

2. But if priesthood and the church are thus indissoluble, 
what, then, is the ministry? and how is it related to the 
idea of the church? (i) The ministry must be personal 
and not official; the man does not become sacred by virtue 
of the office, but the office is sanctified by the man. The 
ideal of an official priesthood is mean and poor ; because it 
degrades the office by making it either transmissible or com- 
municable by some outward rite like the laying on of an 
old and superior official's hands; and because it divorces 
office from ethics, which our religion, in particular, does 
not allow, or function from character, and permits one 
to be reverent to the man as priest while holding in con- 
tempt the priest as man. (ii) Where the ministry is 



41 8 THE MINISTER IS AS THE MAN, AND HE LIKE HIS IDEALS. 

personal, the man is placed in it by the act of God. 
He alone calls and institutes; the man is responsible to 
Him alone, and is bound to live and act as in the eye of 
the Taskmaster, to speak as in the hearing of the Eternal 
Judge, (iii) Where the ministry is personal and deter- 
mined by personal relations, it means that (a) the only 
priesthood possible must spring from the man's organic 
connection with the collective society and his active obedi- 
ence to its invisible Head or his moral holiness. (y5) The 
more completely he epitomizes and impersonates the ideal 
of the society, or reflects and reproduces the character of 
its Head, the better a minister he will be. (iv) And as he 
is his ideal will be, and as his ideal is not to institute or 
conduct ''services," whether brief, bright and brotherly 
or high and solemn, whether "ornate and catholic" or 
"bare and mean" ; but to act and think and speak as if in 
him Jesus Christ really lived, and was once more serving 
God by saving man. 



B 

The second function of Christ which the church ought to 
fulfil is the prophet's. 

I. The prophet is- not so much a foreteller as a 
forth-teller; he teaches by preaching, and he preaches 
because he sees and knows the truth which is God's, 
though also the most urgent concern of man. It used 
to be said that Luther's words were "half-battles"; 
nay, they were often so full of human courage and so 
charged with divine strength as to be equal to whole vic- 
tories. And words that can be so described deserve to be 
called "prophetic." They put into a man the courage 
to live, for they speak the mind of a God and a church 



THE church's office, LIKE CHRIST'S, PROPHETIC 419 

which are both alive and militant. When I hear of the 
reservation of the Sacrament and the awe with which 
good men think of it, or even regard the receptacle where 
the symbols are reserved, my soul grows sick at the utter 
sensuousness even of the religious in the things of the 
Spirit; but when I see the impatience of man in learning 
or in listening to the truth which God wishes to have 
spoken, then my soul becomes stern, because in the presence 
of a darker sin than the sin of sensuousness. If men would 
speak for God, they must learn His secret; and if they 
would learn His secret, then they must spend their days 
with Him, thinking their way by self-denial and hardness 
into the inner mysteries of His truth. And he who has 
been there will love to persuade other men to join the 
glorious company of the seekers who find in this field the 
goodliest pearls. 

2. Our unsolved practical problems are an innumerable 
multitude; while the speculative problems which are the 
vital factors of our practical, form a vaster multitude still. 
And without the church neither can be solved; and the 
church cannot solve them apart from the reason and the 
speech it uses to persuade man. (i) There are large 
questions as to the Scriptures : — how they came to be and 
when; what is the text and who are the authors of the 
books; what is the relation of the narratives they em- 
body to older narratives; what the books severally and 
as a whole mean, whether we can still speak of them as 
a revelation and claim for them the rank of authorities in 
religion, (ii) Then there are large questions as to Christian 
doctrine : — whether God exists, and whether He created 
and now rules; how the ideas of creation and growth are 
related, whether they are contradictory, complementary, 
or mutually supersessive ; how we are to conceive God, 



420 THE PROBLEMS THE CHURCH MUST SOLVE. 

whether as solitary or as social; how we are to conceive 
Christ, whether as God or as man, or as both; and if 
as both, in what way are His natures related. And how 
man is to be conceived, whether as mortal or immortal, 
whether as individual or as race, whether as, by birth, 
sinless or sinful, whether as worth redeeming or as in- 
finitely worthless, (iii) And along with these go problems, 
innumerable and profound, which may be termed ethical, 
as belonging to applied Christian thought : — how best 
such thought may be made to permeate and guide, to 
organize and control the individual, society, and the State ; 
whether it has anything to say to our industrial confusions 
and conflicts, our economic perplexities and fiscal distress, 
our political parties and our national ambitions. 

3. The church, then, ought not to be dumb in the face of a 
needy and listening humanity, especially when she is so sur- 
charged with the interpretation of universal and practicable 
ideals. She is likelier to suffer from want of courage to 
speak the truth than from any want of truth to be spoken. 
The world controls the church more subtly and potently 
than the church can either pervade or control the world. 
There are fussy laymen and fussy ministers in all the 
churches ; and what each likes best to see is his own reflec- 
tion in the other's eyes. There are laymen who like to see 
the minister in the street or on the platform, in the house 
or in society ; acting as secretary of this club or as presi- 
dent of that; marching proudly in the van of one move- 
ment or being dragged, ignominously, behind another. 
Such men seem to think that the Lord takes pleasure 
in the limbs of a man; and that the minister is better 
anywhere than where he ought most commonly to be, 
in the society of God. And there are ministers who are 
excellent men, though without any prophetic gift; min- 



THE MAN WHO IS A HERETIC IN THE TRUTH 42 1 

isters who have never themselves kindled with inspired 
thought or broken into inspired speech ; but are well content 
to deliver their weary weekly tale of conventional common- 
place. The church can never ask too much from its min- 
istry if it will only ask the right things ; it is certain to ask 
too much, however little it may be, if only it asks what is 
wrong. And of its prophetic man, the greater its perplexity 
the more it is justified in asking. The age will follow if 
only the church prove that she can and that she will 
lead; but how can she lead unless she deal with thought 
honestly in honest speech? John Milton said that if 
a man believes simply because his priest or presbytery tells 
him, he is a heretic, even though it be the truth he believes; 
but if the priest or presbytery has no other reason for faith 
save the voice of ecclesiastical authority, then the heresy be- 
longs even more to the misleader than to the misled . There 
is a true and a false apologetic; the church that is always 
defending herself and her faith is, as a matter of fact, 
accusing both and condemning both. Faith can be vindi- 
cated only in one way, by being realized; and it is best 
realized when inwardly joined to mind and outwardly in- 
corporated in life and society. Without this daily incor- 
poration of thought in being no church can be justified, 
and with it none can be condemned. 



The third function of Christ is kinghood. 

I. The church which serves Christ freely shall reign with 
Him. It can govern only by submitting to be governed; 
before it can command it must learn to obey. The politi- 
cal dream of a great statesman was a ' ' Free Church in a 
Free State"; but a ''free State" does not mean a state 



^22 THE CHURCH FREE THAT IT MAY OBEY. 

of anarchy, or a ''free church" a church without a 
head, irresponsible and unbound. Only a church gov- 
erned can be in the strict sense ''free," though its 
laws must be of its own making. The essence of free- 
dom is not the right to do as we please, but power to 
do as we ought; and that is the only freedom we can 
either understand or be enthusiastic about. Such freedom 
may exist in two forms, as (i) liberty which is internal, 
freedom of choice, the free will which no coercive impulse, 
no regnant lust, no sovereign motive can supersede or 
destroy ; and as (ii) freedom which is external, the absence 
of the restraints that hinder obedience or force it into shapes 
illicit and unholy. And these two forms imply not only a 
governed church but its governed members. They obey a 
higher law than the law of the State, and are justified by 
their works. There was a fine simplicity in the old struggle 
of the free churches to be ; their right was afifirmed on the 
one side and denied on the other, and though the men who 
denied it had the power to use ''fines," "imprisonment," 
"exile," and even "death," yet the men who affirmed the 
right prevailed. Hence we have churches which have so 
affirmed their right to be "free" as to lie under a more 
absolute authority than any impersonated restraints which 
can hinder a completer obedience to the will of God. 

2. But these forms of our first principle involve a 
second distinction: between restraints that hinder the 
exercise of freedom, which may be removed from with- 
out; and liberty, which must be evolved from within. 
The distinction has its psychological and subjective, 
as well as its historical and objective justification. 
The first is. Freedom is matter of choice, not of action; 
the second is. Liberty forced upon an unwilling people 
ceases to be freedom and becomes bondage. When France 



THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN FREEDOM AND LIBERTY 423 

in her Revolution shook herself free from kings who 
had ceased to govern, she did it in the sacred name 
of liberty; and when the monarchs of Europe assembled 
and tried to compel her to take back the royal brood 
she had just cast out, she in the same sacred name re- 
sisted an act which deserved to be termed tyranny. 
But when later France mustered armies and sent them 
over Europe to compel the nations to believe in the rights 
of man and to become republican and free, she was guilty 
of a still darker form of tyranny ; for it was simple tyranny 
to try to force upon an unwilling people a polity w^hich 
they hated. All liberty must, then, come from within and 
cannot be imported from without. And Christ's freedom 
is more than freedom from restraint; it is both internal 
and external. He is the church's inner principle of free- 
dom; its Heart as well as its Head. But He is also its 
outer principle; its Head as well as its Heart. Within 
He is the hope of glory; without He is the object of the 
hope's desire. Where He governs no State can forbid 
obedience; where He dwells lust ceases to rule, and man 
is free. 

xn 

The forces which have ever threatened with danger the 
church of Christ have been of two kinds, one external, 
coercive, depriving it of freedom; another internal, de- 
bilitative, depriving it of liberty. 

I. The coercive and external force has varied from 
age to age. Once kings were the great troublers of the 
church, and they sometimes trouble her still. It was the 
passion of an English king for an impossible uniformity in 
religion that roused the conscience of our people and 



424 FREEDOM FROM RESTRAINTS WHICH HINDER OBEDIENCE. 

drove thousands of "free-born" Englishmen across the 
ocean, thus creating, indirectly, the expansion of the Eng- 
lish race ; and it was the same passion working in the mon- 
arch, answered and resisted by men who knew themvSelves 
to be citizens of the Eternal City, which evolved into fact 
the idea that the church to be free must be responsible to 
its Head alone, thus creating English nonconformity. But 
from the fear of the king the churches of to-day have 
been largely emancipated. We may not forget, indeed, 
that in the colossal empire of Russia the Emperor is even 
more the head of the church than of the State ; and though 
he may be a gentle and innocent man, yet the system he 
stands for is neither gentle nor innocent. For both the 
Russians — Ignatieff and Tolstoi — whose practical Indi- 
vidualism is as strong as their theoretical Socialism is pro- 
nounced — know to their cost that an ecclesiastical bu- 
reaucracy has no conscience and no heart, and of all calami- 
ties to a State there is none greater than a sovereign who 
must speak as his ecclesiastics will. Infallibility is suprem- 
acy in the region of opinion ; he who speaks for the whole 
and to it can, ex officio, commit no error. Sovereignty is 
supremacy in the sphere of legal and civil action — he who 
is the fountain of law can do no wrong, i.e. cannot be 
judged by the law whose source he is and whose sanctions 
he upholds. The sovereignty cannot be absolute which 
leaves opinion free; while the infallibility must be qualified 
and conditioned which has to adjust its decrees to the inde- 
pendent State within which it has to live and to whose law^s 
it must conform. But where the head of the State is also 
head of the church the two principles of Infallibility and 
Sovereignty are so combined as to form a tyranny which 
opinion cannot question without being declared by law a 
rebel guilty of treason and worthy of death. We may say, 



COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY SUPERSEDE KINGHOOD 425 

then, of the Russian Emperor, that he belongs to a system 
at once as ancient as paganism, and ahen to Christianity, so 
that he survives as our one Imperator who is also Pontifex 
Maximus. 

2. But while the churches have, as a rule, been 
emancipated from the fear of kinghood, other and more 
terrible forces strive for the place the king once occu- 
pied. Commerce seems a beneficent force which ought 
to make for peace; it binds nation to nation, makes 
the ocean a pathway between peoples, and appeals to 
interests and emotions which feel war to be a thing abhor- 
rent. But greed is as ruthless as commerce is beneficent, 
and the commerce which has become the mere minister of 
greed is transformed into the fruitful mother of strife. 
And where greed reigns it spares no ideal of the State 
and no grace of the church. 

As peaceful and kindly commerce ought to unite all 
nations abroad, industry ought to harmonize all classes 
into a single society at home. But there is nothing to me 
more tragic than the wars of industry which are now being 
waged in all industrial communities. They threaten to split 
us into fragments, and to substitute for social peace the 
horrors and the feuds, the desolations and impoverish- 
ments of social war. In all our cities there is going on 
an economic struggle where wealth has no pity for 
poverty and the poor show no mercy to the rich; where 
the employer accumulates his millions and the employed 
husbands his skill ; where the one stands by his capital and 
the other by his labour as if either could be happy without 
the other or realize existence otherwise than through him. 
And the struggle which divides society cannot be kept out 
of our churches, especially as they try to become more so- 
cially efficient. The rich man, by the munificent use of his 



426 THE CHURCH OUGHT TO COMMAND CAPITAL AND LABOUR. 

money, would fain enlist the church on his side; while 
the working-man, in his congresses and unions, by threats 
of alienation and final departure, would compel her to 
further his interests ; or, at least, to serve the cause of the 
millions who labour against the thousands who thrive on 
their skill. But the church can be the servant of no class, 
if it is to be the minister of God in behalf of all. It can 
as little do the will of capital as obey the bidding of labour. 
To its own Master it standeth or falleth, and its Master is the 
Christ, whose representative it is. It is bound to do every- 
thing for man that man needs to have done for him. It can 
tolerate no wrong, whether inflicted by man on man or 
by class on class; but if it is to protect the weak it must 
remain independent of the strong, whether the strength be 
that of money or of man, whether of many or of few. Its 
fundamental principle is: ''Because I belong to Christ no 
class and no man can own me; as His I am the servant 
of no interest and no person, but of all men and of all 
classes. Where injustice needs to be punished, wrong re- 
proved, or the weak defended against the strong, I must 
be on the side of justice, right, and weakness." 

3. The debilitative forces which threaten the church's 
liberty may be described as the fashions, tendencies, and 
tempers of the time. Two things may here be specified: 
the reign (i) of ^stheticism and (ii) of Athleticism. By 
^stheticism I mean the temper which seeks to gratify the 
senses as senses rather than as avenues to the spirit; and 
by Athleticism I mean the glorification of the muscular as 
the chief quality in man, the cultivation of the limbs as a 
duty which precedes the cultivation of the soul. It will 
be most in harmony with our purpose that we, mainly, 
confine ourselves to ^Estheticism in the church. Now, I do 
not despise a seemly or a stately worship, or a worship 



LIBERTY AS FREEDOM FROM ARBITRATIVE FORCES 427 

whose acts and articles, however multitudinous, are used 
as symbols that speak to the spirit of ideas which trans- 
cend it. I may deplore the rudimentary notion of re- 
ligion which finds ceremonial so rich in spiritual significance, 
even for a Christian man, as to be a necessity for Christian 
worship ; but the notion stands on a higher plane than that 
which thinks worship excellent just as it pleases man and 
forgets altogether the glory or the adoration of God. What 
I despise as profane and vulgar is the idea that our worship 
is meant to attract men rather than to express our awful 
joy and penitential prostration before the majesty of God. 
And this ^stheticism is but an aspect of a dominant and 
devouring Athleticism. Both y^stheticism and Athleti- 
cism are sensuous, the one more secretly, the other more 
frankly ; both dislike instruction and both believe in pleas- 
ure, though in the one case the pleasure may be disguised 
as mock humility, and in the other it may blatantly mag- 
nify the muscles and the limbs. Man may need amuse- 
ment, but the churches ought not to organize themselves 
with the view of amusing him. They ought to enrich 
and ennoble, to consecrate and purify happiness; but let 
it never be forgotten that the church as a society of holy 
souls exists for the cultivation of holiness; that, as freed 
from the dominion of the State, it stands under the sole 
authority of Christ; and that it is meant to be the organ 
of divine truth, the vehicle of the divine life, the home of 
divine worship, the bearer of all the agencies which can 
quicken and regenerate man. If these things be remem- 
bered the church will prove herself in all her methods and 
ends worthy of her Founder and King. 

The one thing that can prevent the action of the many 
debilitating influences that play upon the church is the 
inhabitation of the Spirit; the indwelling and life of God 



428 ACTS OF CHRIST'S WHICH ARE THE CHURCH'S. 

can alone free her from the bondage of men and place her 
under the obedience of Christ. She will then be more 
governed by the ideals which command her future and 
less by the traditions which bind her to the past. And 
this ought to be the case where a church is in a large and 
honest sense free, where the motto is, the old Adam must 
die that the Lord from heaven may live; Christ in every 
man that every man may be a Christian indeed. 

XIII 

The acts which are properly Christ's and can yet be 
predicated of the church which is His body, are (i) Incar- 
nation, (ii) Redemption, (iii) Resurrection, and (iv) 
Eternal Judgment. It is adventurous to say that the 
church can perform such acts as these. Yet as the Head 
He cannot do anything without affecting the members; 
and if He communicates of His own dignity and grace, has 
any one any right to obj ect ? What He does in love we may 
not refuse to do, especially as His works are ours. 

I . There is contained in any theory of incarnation a given 
conception of God, which is in all thought the regnant 
notion, and also the mode of His working on, in, and for 
man. Now, a figure which in Scripture, and especially in 
the Pauline Epistles, plays a great part in unfolding this 
double relation, is that of the church with all its members 
as constituting a body, and its organs,* with Christ as its 
Head-t Jesus Himself speaks of the chief corner-stone as 
rejected by the builders, yet as "grinding to powder" 
every one on whom it falls.} The church, then, is, because 
composed of men, ''thebodyof Christ." § He is its Head, || 

* I Cor. xii. 12-21. t Ephes. iv. 15; Col. i. 8. 

J Matt. xxi. 42-4. § Ephes. v. 23 ; i Cor. xii. 29. 

II Ephes. iv. 15. 



WHAT DOES THE HEADSHIP MEAN? 429 

who rules it,* saves it,t has in it the preeminence,} which 
He has not assumed, but has had it assigned by the Father's 
will ; § its sacraments He has constituted, 1 1 and its ministers 
are His apostles. Tf Now, why is the church called ''the 
body"? It is not because it is one, though its members 
are a multitude — the figure in this sense is old, much older 
than Paul — but because there is no other way in which an 
invisible Head can still seem to live and be active among 
men. And why is Christ termed the ''Head of the body " ? 
Not simply because He rules it, and so guides it as to 
make all its actions rational and worthy of a reasonable 
being, but because without the Head the body would have 
no ideas to translate into realities. And the Head without 
the ideas would be as useless as the ideas without the Head, 
which is as a home of reason, a suitable home for reason- 
able things. The reign of the Head therefore signifies that 
reason governs man, just as the body means the embodi- 
ment of its ideas in a divine society. And it is the function 
of the will which is God, to translate the idealities of the 
Head into the realities of what we term the body ; and of 
these the noblest is man understood as a collective unity, 
obedient to God as a humanity which yet has stood face 
to face with disobedience. 

2. Now, this raises the whole question of incarnation, 
especially as it affects God, who refuses all praise to 
any "graven image,"** yet pronounces Himself as "well 
pleased" with Jesus Christ, whom He styled "the 

* I Cor. xi, 5 ; i Tim. vi. 13 ; Rev. xix. 16; xx. 4-6. 

I Col. i. 20-23; I Tim. iv. 10. J Col. i. 18. 
§ Ephes. i. 22; Col. i. 19. 

II I Cor. X. 16; xi. 23-6; Luke xxii. 19-20; Matt. xxvi. 29; 
Mark xiv. 22. 

^ Matt. X. 2-5; Mark iii. 14-19; Luke vi. 8-16; John xx. 21; 
Ephes. ii. 20. ** Isaiah ii. 8. 



430 AS CHRIST IS THE INCARNATION OF GOD, THE CHURCH IS 

Son of His love."* As Christ is the incarnation of 
the love of God, the church is the incarnation of Christ's 
Spirit and purpose; the one is as is the other. The 
church which incarnates is as the Christ who is incar- 
nated. He must be known in order that the church 
may be understood; and to be known in either the 
church or the world means that He is known in both, 
and the faces He turns to God and to man are alike 
seen. As the Son of God, He implies that love is so of 
the essence of God, that He cannot love without being 
benevolent, or be benevolent without being beneficent; 
and for Him to be beneficent is to be the author of all our 
good. As "Son of Man," he is no man's son, but child of 
the race ; and such in a double relation : (a) as perfect Man, 
He realizes the image man was created in ; {/3) and as to be 
perfect is to be holy, and holiness speaks of courage, invinci- 
bility by evil, which could not subdue Him. Every man 
can therefore be Christ-like. Ability is here the measure 
of obligation, which, fulfilled, brings nearer fulfilment the 
dream of God. That dream is not realized by individuals 
being saved, but only by the salvation of society as a whole, 
or the collective human race. And as both "Son of God" 
and "Son of Man," the church is His incarnation as He is 
God's. "He is Head of the Body." 

3. Christ is Redeemer, and His work is Redemption. 
He "gave Himself for our sins, according to the will of 
God and our Father."! He did not die to buy us back 
from divine hate, but to reconcile us to divine love. "God 
is love," and "sent His Son to be the propitiation for our 
sins." J And the church exists expressly to continue 



* Mark i. 11; ix. 19; Matt. iii. 17; xii. 16; xvii, 5; Luke ix. 35; Ephes. 
i. 6; iii. 19, etc. 

t Gal. i, 4 ; ii. 20. J i John iv. 8-10. 



HIS CONTINUOUS INCARNATION AND RESURRECTION 43 1 

Christ's redeeming work by translating it into fact; and, 
in the words of Paul, to ''fill up that which is behind of the 
afflictions of Christ in my flesh for His body's sake."* 
Unless humanity be completely reconciled to God, Christ's 
work is incomplete ; so far as it depended on Himself, He 
"finished" it, but not so far as it depended on Man. In 
that connection it can never be finished while one soul re- 
mains outside the ends of God ; and outside His ends every 
soul lives who loves sin more than his Maker. 

4. The Resurrection of Christ was an act of the Son 
as well as the Father. It signified that death could not 
claim the living; that life reigned, and with it immortality. 
For who can die if he must ever rise again? And what 
does death become save a change from one form of being 
to another? And has not the church from Christ's day to 
this lived an immortal life? Have we not a formula which 
saith that, while every man must taste death, no society 
can? Man, like a shock of corn, in his season comes to 
the grave, and we leave him in the dust, having built over 
him a tombstone on which has been recorded an epitaph 
that attributes to him more virtues than he ever possessed. 
But though communities die often, they have no graveyard, 
nor does any epitaph record their actions or their merits. 
And while the church does not die, nor can it, till the last 
man is reconciled to God, it rises with Christ that it may 
continue His work, which is also its own. 

5. Christ is judge of ''quick and dead," and what He 
is. His church is. It judges men, measures by character, 
tries them by what they do and what they ought to do. 
What the church is, man is ; and what man is, the eternal 
Judge proves, 

* Col. i. 24. 



VI 

THE TEACHING OF JESUS 
IN ITS THIRD PERIOD: THE DEATH 

I 

I. ^T^HE ''teaching of Jesus" in its third and final period 
^ shows, alike in substance and in mode, differences 
which, so far from being mere accidents, are rooted in the 
history, and are, as concerns both events and persons, 
legitimate outgrowths from it. The changes which affect 
the substance come from differences in what may be termed, 
alternatively, either the environment or the background; 
while the changes which affect the mode proceed from 
differences in the persons who either live within the en- 
vironment or face to face with the background. Yet, even 
as so stated, it is evident that the above antithesis — so far, 
at least, as the special agents and forms of the contrasted 
differences are concerned — is not to be construed as abso- 
lute, but strictly as relative; for no changed environment 
or background can affect substance, unless through persons ; 
and where the persons are uninfluenced and think as they 
always have done, differences do not emerge. Persons can- 
not therefore affect modes if they live unchanged within a 
new environment, or still think as they thought when con- 
fronted with the old background. What, then, the distinc- 
tion means is this : there is a double difference, which still is 
one; every change in the environment is reflected in the 

432 



CHANGE IN TEACHING IN CHANGED ENVIRONMENT 433 

persons who dwell within it, and changed persons signify a 
changed environment or background. Man, therefore, still 
holds the key of the situation, which is as he is. 

2 We have, then, the old environment and the new : — 
Jerusalem is substituted for Galilee. And the substitution 
is twofold, concerns both nature and history. 

(i) Nature; Jerusalem as a city was without physical 
atmosphere, and the only air it breathed was narrow and 
heated ; but Galilee was a province where the atmosphere 
was broad and cool, and acted on the excited brain as only 
such an air can. In the city house stood close to house, 
where they could be left desolate* — and the desolation of 
the city is awful — and each had its own function, where one 
could break bread,t or preach in privacy.} In it street ran 
parallel with street or crossed it, and each street had its own 
fame and designation.! But in the province man was free 
to roam up the hillside, and over the plain, and sail on the 
lake, or wherever streams murmured, trees grew, and 
flowers bloomed. Every sense of man was pleased. In 
the city all we see speaks of man and his imperfect 
workmanship; in the country all man sees praises God 
and exults in being His perfect work. And in the province 
of Galilee Jesus feels free; He stands near nature; we 
listen to her voice as we hear Him. Even the parables 
which give distinction to the teaching of this middle period 
are stories based on close observation of the processes of 
nature; and if man is added, as in the sower who casts 
abroad his seed, it is only that he may praise her for the 
wealth she pours into the lap of the industrious. || But in 

* Matt, xxiii. 38. The words were spoken in the Jerusalem period, 
and with special reference to the city (cf. -i^j ; Luke xiii, 34). 
f Acts ii. 46. % lb. V. 42 ; xx. 20. 

§ Luke xiv. 21 ; Acts ix. 11 ; Rev. xxi. 21 ; xxii. 2. 
II Matt. xiii. 8 ; Mark iv. 8 ; Luke viii. 8. 
2 F 



434 JERUSALEM DIFFERENT IN NATURE 

the whole of the Jerusalem period the voice of nature is 
never heard; or, if her voice be heard, it is in an incident, 
at once symbolical and allegorical, so characteristic of the 
mood of the moment as the cursing of the barren fig-tree * 
The earth mourns ; f the race of men marry and are given, 
heedlessly, in marriage ; % the deceitfulness of nature and 
man is insisted on ; § it is the theme of parables ; 1 1 and the 
beatitude of the good servant who distrusts nature and 
trusts God is assured; while the "evil servant," who dis- 
trusts both, is described as a man who *'eats and drinks 
with the drunken, "T[ It is a note, then, of ''the teaching 
of Jesus" in its final form to complain against both nature 
and man, over against the trust in her and in her impartial 
fruitfulness which marked His earlier words. 

(ii) While neither nature nor history change easily, or 
without mutual consent, yet of these two history is the 
more potent. In Palestine this was a well-known truth, 
which had as its palmary example the relation between 
Judaea and Galilee, (a) The Northern land stood, as re- 
gards nature, in waters as in fields, in fauna as in flora, pre- 
eminently above the Southern. Both looked at from below 
and at a distance, say, from the sea and the low-lying cities 
of the coast, seemed hill-countries; but "the mountains" 
which guarded Jerusalem by standing "round about" 
her,** were better to her than the surrounding nature, 
whose fields were neither "good" nor "flowed with milk 
and honey. "tt "The inhabitants of Jerusalem" were, 
indeed, said to dwell upon "a very fruitful hill," fenced, and 

* Mark xi. 12-14, 20, 26; Matt. xxi. 18-22. f Matt. xxiv. 26-30. 

I Matt. xxiv. 4-7, 17-19, 37-9; Mark xiii. 5-8. 
§ Matt. xxiv. 36, 42-3; Mark xiii. 12-13, 15-17. 

II Mark xiii. 28, 29; Matt. xxiv. 32-3; Luke xxi. 29-31. 

^ Matt. xxiv. 46-51 ; Luke, xii. 43-6. ** Ps. cxxvi. 2. 

•f-f Exod. iii. 8 ; xiii. 6. ; Joshua v. 6; Jcr. xi. 5 ; Ezek. xx. 6. 



AND HISTORY FROM GALILEE 435 

cleared, and planted of God; but when He who planted 
the ''vineyard" looked that it should bring forth choice 
vines, there came up only "briars and thorns," and the 
clouds that floated above the land "rained no rain upon 
it." * This was the simple truth ; nature had done all she 
could, and could do no more, even though Judaea held the 
city of David ; and eyes accustomed to the desert saw all 
fields that were green as equally good. But (/3) history 
here showed her power; she stepped in and changed 
everything by enlarging and consolidating the North 
as a province of empire, which she named Galilee. The 
word which we thus, incorrectly, transliterate originally 
denoted a "district" or "region" lying either in the moun- 
tains of Napthali,t or beyond the sea. J It is the name, too, 
given to the land which had twenty cities on it that Solomon 
gave to Hiram, King of Tyre,§ or Hiram to Solomon. || 
And Tiglath-pileser incorporated the cities of Galilee into 
the Assyrian Empire. T[ From that time it became a prov- 
ince of successive empires — Persian, Greek, Roman — 
each more highly organized and with better legislative 
machinery than its predecessor. Galilee ceased, then, to be 
a mere region, and took its place properly within an Empire 
and under Law; especially under laws which dealt with 
what one would have called the settlement of the alien.** 

3. There is nothing that more surprises us in this field 
than the survival of type, (a) Galilee, which began to 

* Isa. V. 1-6. t Joshua xx. 7; xxi. 32. 

I Isa. ix. I ; Matt. iv. 15. See as to Trepav, denoting what lies 
"beyond" or "on the other side," Matt. viii. 18; xvi. 5. 

§ I Kings ix. II. \\ 2 Chron. viii. 2. ^2 Kings xv. 29, 

** I Mace. V. 15, where irdarjs TaXiXaias is said to be d\\o(p6X(ay 
dXkd^vXos when used as a substantive denotes (Acts x. 28) a foreigner 
or heathen in opposition to, or contrast with a Jew, or dvrjp lovdaios. 
Josephus, Bel. Jud., ii, 81, speaks of, incorrectly as it seems, Judas 
of Gamala as dvrip TakiXaios, a man of Galilee, 



436 THE GALILEAN A PROVINCIAL TO THE CITIZEN 

be by mixing races, continued to do what it commenced 
by doing. The Assyrian, the Persian, the Arabian, the 
Greek, and the Roman were all alike its citizens, and with 
the native Semite encouraged to retain ancestral religious 
customs and beliefs. Hence to be a Jew of Galilee was 
to be a person whose orthodoxy was suspected, just as 
measured by the correct standard of pronunciation in 
the capital his "speech bewrayed him." * (13) While even 
in Maccabean times acknowledged Jews lived in Galilee,t 
the home of their race was Judsea; in the city of David 
their temple stood, their God was worshipped, and their 
religion lived, and there it could alone revive. J Jesus may 
have felt freer in Galilee than in Judaea, § where the men were 
brave, and the very women shared their courage, 1 1 though 
out of it no good thing or person, like a prophet or the 
Messiah, could possibly come.^j (7) Galilee became, there- 
fore, notorious in Judaea for the stupidity of its inhabitants, 
but also for their irreligion. If one wanted to see how the 
dispersion — or how living alongside men of another race — 
affected belief, one had only to look thither. Latitudinari- 
anism was worse than complete lack of faith, and every Gal- 
ilean one's eye rested on was certain to be a latitudinarian. 

* Matt. xxvi. 7^ ; Mark xiv. 69-70; Luke xxii. 59, 

f I Mace. V. 17, 20-2. They were known not only by their names, 
but also by the places whence they came and where they were settled 
(see V. 26). 

X John iv. 20-2 ; Luke xxiv. 44-7. 

§ John vii. i ; vi. 59, 66; Matt. iv. 2. 

II Matt, xxvii. 55 ; Mark xv, 41 ; Luke xxiii. 49, 55 ; also Josephus, 
Antiq. 

^ John i. 46; vii. 40-1, 52 ; Acts ii. 7 ; v. 27- 



OF THE capital: JESUS AS HISTORICAL PERSON 437 



II 

I. Out of the changes worked by history within the en- 
vironment or background come results which we may now 
summarize : — 

(i) The principal person we have to conceive and explain 
is Jesus, and He is — if conceived aright — as capable of 
growth as if He were a minor character in history. Why 
it should be assumed, contrary to all experience, whether 
written or personal, that He is incapable of development, 
I know not. Here it is simply postulated as a fact which 
the Gospel history is wise enough to recognize * 

(ii) Galilee, specifically Nazareth, f is chosen as His home. 
There were manifest advantages in the choice ; the country 
was freer and more varied than that which lay around 
either Jerusalem or Bethlehem ; He knew the difference,} 
and judged it better to bear a provincial name than to be 
a son of the capital.! It is not only that the country which 
lay round Nazareth was a land of hill and dale, congenial 
to high thought, or that He could see from its mountains 
the ''blue Mediterranean," or that He luxuriated in its being 
"full of growth and shade," and dwelt on it as the scene 
of the greatest of ancient songs, or that He found the wild 
animals "small and gentle"; || but that it was a good 
land for men, where they lived not as Semites, or Greeks, 
or Romans, who each worshipped his own god and followed 

* Luke ii. 40, 52. 

f Prof. Percy Gardner, Exploratio EvangeHca, p. 253. 

X Luke xiii. 1-4. 

§ Matt xxvi. 69 ; Mark xiv. 70 ; Luke xxiii. 6. How long-lived the 
reproach was we know from the speech put in the hour of death into the 
mouth of Julian the Apostate. 

II Renan, Vie de Jisus, pp. 67-8. 



438 VARIETY IN BELIEF WHERE RACES MANY. 

his own religion, but as neighbours whose speech differed 
while their hearts agreed. 

2. Man, acting according to his nature, judges concerning 
Religion more tolerantly where his races are many and his re- 
ligions more mixed, than where there is but one race, and, 
consequently, only one religion ; for in this case he feels freer 
to play with history as he lists, or to imagine that where 
there is but one family of pure descent there is only one 
true religion. And it was so in Israel. The controversies 
are hotter where religions do not dwell side by side, and 
where one alone is permitted to live; for then three prin- 
ciples are assumed : (a) that God when He instituted His 
religion so spoke to man directly that He founded it upon 
personal authority, and not upon human reason and argu- 
ment ; and (/3) that reason is a frailer basis than authority ; 
and (7) that the multitude of religions is due not so much 
to reason as to human folly. Man apparently resents more 
to be judged a fool in his thoughts than to be judged as 
having no thoughts at all. The question at issue between 
the Jew and the Galilean concerned two points : — the 
right of a religion to be and the interpretation of it. There 
was, therefore, a dangerous rivalry between the two prov- 
inces, for it concerned the proper relation of the reason 
to religion, and of the State to the religious person. The 
consequent controversy was keen on two points, both of 
which related to the nature of religion : (i) as to the neces- 
sary persons, and (ii) as to the necessary things. 

(i) Two orders of persons though t as they embodied certain 
principles that they were necessary to religion. These were 
either members of sects : Pharisees, found in both provinces, 
and Sadducees, peculiar to Judaea ; or professional classes,* 

* It is here assumed that the Sadducaic party is one with the priesthood 
(Acts V. 17; xxiii. 6). 



THE PERSON IN RELIGION; PHARISEE AND SADDUCEE 439 

like the scribes, whose duty it was to study, and teach and 
read the law wherever Judaism was; or like the priests, 
whose function it was to worship God for the people, and 
who could not therefore be where God could not be wor- 
shipped; or they were men known and named, like Ga- 
maliel,* ''a doctor of the law," or like Caiaphas and 
Annas, ''chief priests, "f who thought highly of their office 
because they chanced to fill it, and of Aaron because they 
were numbered among his descendants. The Pharisee was, 
as we say, democratic; stood by his people, the nation of 
the Jews as constituted by the Law, which they were bound 
to study and obey. He was strongly in favour of the 
Jewish law and State and as strongly opposed to Rome, 
just as his rivals, the Sadducees, were friendly and im- 
perialistic. The Pharisee was in temper opposed to Galilee, 
though not in conviction. On the contrary, his funda- 
mental beliefs compelled to a measure of friendliness ; for 
did he not hold that the law was there to be studied and 
known ? As it was, God was ; He and His religion were to 
be known by study, and therefore the Law had nothing to 
fear from extension. It is one of the minor notes of truth in 
the evangelical History that while Jesus is represented as 
strenuously opposed to the Pharisee, just as the Pharisee 
is also opposed to Jesus, the opposition is restricted to 
Galilee; the moment He enters Judaea and Jerusalem 
He passes out of their hands into those of the Sadducees. J 
It is ''the chief priests" who covenant with Judas; § they 

* Acts V. 34. f Acts iv. 6; cf. i John xviii. 13-14. 

X The arithmetical test can be here appHed, and is most significant. 
Matthew has over thirty references to the Pharisees, but they completely 
disappear from the Passion. The nearest they come is in xxvii. 62, which 
is a story connected with the Resurrection, and they appear in the 
company of "the chief priests." Mark has in his narrative of the 
Passion one allusion (xii. 13) to the action of the Pharisees, but Luke has 
none, though his references are almost as many as Matthew's. 

§ Matt. xxvi. 14; Mark xii. 10. 



440 LAW NECESSARY TO RELIGION: TEMPLE TO WORSHIP. 

take counsel against Him "to put Him to death," and lay 
a trap for the Roman procurator to get him to help them.*^ 
The chief priests never appear in Galilee,t they appear 
nowhere save, according to our Synoptic Gospels, in Judaea, 
or when Jesus teaches that He is to be done to death.f 

(ii) As there are two orders of persons, there are two 
classes of things, like the Law and the Synagogue, or like 
the Temple and Worship, necessary to religion ; these things 
are very different, yet essentially connected. The Law was 
to the Pharisee the Law of Moses; to the Sadducee it 
was the Levitical Law. The Pharisee was because he 
was necessary to the Law, but the Sadducee because the 
Law was necessary to him. The Law involved to the 
Pharisee the synagogue, which was the symbol of instruc- 
tion, of obedience or good conduct; but to the Sadducee 
it was the way in which God could best be worshipped 
and the theory of who were to worship Him. In other 
words, the Law was to the Pharisee what it was to Jesus 
in the ''Sermon on the Mount," where there was room for 
controversy touching what it enjoined, but to the Sadducee 
it was a law of "carnal commandments," occupied with 
regulating the descent of the priesthood. As was the Law 
such was the Synagogue: and as was the worship such 
was the temple. There was but one temple, as there was 
one God, so one place where He could be worshipped ; Jeru- 
salem was the fit place, the Jews were the fit people, and 
the Sadducees supplied the fit order, the priesthood. 

* Matt, xxvii. 1-2 ; Mark xv. i. 

•j- The priests have no function apart from the Temple. One of the 
features of the Pauline epistles is the avoidance of such terms as " priest" 
and "chief priest." This is not to be explained by such a flagrant fact 
as that Paul was by descent and connection a " Pharisee," but simply by 
his rigorous truth. The "priestly" relation to the death of Christ was 
not one the priesthood itself would care to remember. 

X Matt. xvi. 21 ; xx. 17; Mark viii. 31 ; ix. 31 ; x. 32. 



CHANGED ENVIRONMENTS TO A CHANGED MANHOOD 44 1 



III 

We have now to consider the change in the mode of the 
teaching relative to the spirits aUke of those who heard it 
given and of Him who gave it. The entrance into Jeru- 
salem led to a change in the Life and Teaching of Jesus 
too vast to be unnoted. In all our Synoptic Gospels it is 
duly recorded, and it begins with Matthew xxi, Mark 
xi, Luke xix. 28. 

I. There was a change in the opposition. This has 
already been stated. There was substitution of Sadducee 
for Pharisee, of priest for scribe, of men like Caiaphas and 
Annas for men like Gamaliel. The difference could be seen 
in Jesus Himself. He judged the Pharisees more severely; 
for He felt that His relation to Judaism was conditioned on 
theirs; that had they instead of tarrying on its threshold 
seen into its ethical wealth, He had done the same, and so 
been spared unnecessary speech; that had He begun His 
career within Judaism and not without He could not have 
been the victim, which He felt Himself to be, of the Sad- 
ducaic priests; and that the Pharisees, who stood so 
near the kingdom, deserved reproach for not entering it.* 
On the other hand, He saw as He had not done before into 
their faithfulness, and did them justice; for he held 
that while God had two sons to whom he said, "Go work 
to-day in My vineyard," the elder, who refused, repented, 
and finally went, was the Pharisee, the younger who 
answered, ''I go," and went not, represented ''the smooth- 
tongued priest" ;t and that they looked for the sign of the 

* If we would measure His wrath against the Pharisee, "who devoured 
widows' houses and for a pretence made a long prayer," we must read his 
famous denunciation in Matthew xxiii. 13-33. 

t Matt. xxi. 28-30. 



442 THE CHANGE JERUSALEM WORKS IN JESUS. 

Son of Man and watched for the coming of the Lord;* and 
that while the five fooHsh virgins typified the Sadducees, 
the five wise represented the Pharisees.f Jesus spoke 
hard things about the Sadducees; but He did not con- 
demn them for saying ''there is no resurrection," even 
though "He put them to silence. "J He warned His dis- 
ciples against the leaven of the ''chief priests," who took 
an active part in the tragedy of the cross, and assumed its 
blame and its guilt. § There is nothing that is blinder than 
hate, especially hate of the Good. 

2. There is in Jesus' own Spirit a change. Wellhausen 1 1 
is so struck with the change that in his Commentary on 
Mark he specially notes it, naming the division as occupied 
with what he calls ' ' the Passion. ' ' This change is expressed 
in the fashion of His works, which are more apocalyptic than 
of old. When I was young, and the only school of free criti- 
cism was represented by the men of Tiibingen, it was held 
that to prove a thing to be apocalyptic was equal to proving 
it not an original part of the Gospel. In those days Paul 
was held to be the ultimate and true standard of primitive 
Christian thinking. What was in his epistles was histori- 
cally true ; what could be shown to be inconsistent with them 
was demonstrably false. But now matters are changed ; it 
is seen that apocalyptic teaching is genuinely Judaic; or 
that so far from the Book of Revelation being singular, it is 
only one among many, which include, indeed, a work so little 
suspected as the Book of Daniel. Jesus, then, could not 
have been believed to be a genuine Jewish Messiah, unless 
He had been apocalyptic ; and it is also in keeping with 
His character that His apocalypse should have been de- 

* Matt, xxiv, 30, 40-46. t Matt. xxv. 1-13. 

J Matt. xxii. 23-34; Mark xii. 18-27; Luke xx. 27-38. 

§ Matt, xxvii. 41. || Das Evangelium Marci, p. 92. 



THE APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE 



443 



livered not in Galilee but in Judaea, a land which the city of 
David with its one temple to Jehovah had made holy, and 
which was baptized into new holiness by the Maccabees 
who had struggled against the godless Seleucidae for freedom 
to realize religion. Judaea was thus a holy land for the 
people, who strove to live according to the law of their 
God ; and possessed a literature which as historical repre- 
sented the past and as prophetic forecasted the future. 
What is denoted as ** apocalyptic literature" is more easily 
described than defined, especially as definitions have ranged 
from it as combining "instruction" in the manner of ''the 
Book of Enoch" and "exhortation" in the style of ''the 
Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs"* to an attempt "to 
solve the difficulties connected with a belief in God's right- 
eousness and the suffering condition of His servants on 
earth . " f Neither definition is characteristic ; the former is 
too narrow and fixes on a question of style, which is as true of 
the earliest as of the latest teaching of Jesus ; and the latter 
is too broad, because it fixes on an idea too little distinctive 
of "apocalyptic literature," and what it states as its "prob- 
lem" is too much that of the Hebrew poetical and pro- 
phetical books. The analysis necessary to definition must 
therefore seek to discover the comm.on root of every 
difference, whether of style and form or of matter. A 
literary revival may be the event which makes an "apoca- 
lypse" possible; but it is too special to be explained by 
mere general considerations. There were similar phenom- 
ena in Greece, as writers so opposed in method and conclu- 
sions as Plutarch and Plotinus show ; but no one quotes the 
later Greek literature as "apocalyptic." 

3. On the contrary, what is thus named is so imitative 

* Schiirer, The Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ, Div. ii, vol. 11, 
p. 46. 

t Ency. Bib., art. "Apocalyptic Literature." 



444 THE APOCALYPSE OF JESUS. 

that while it cannot arise without conscious literary effort, 
yet it can exist only in harmony with a prior highly esteemed 
literature. This determines the matter, for no literature 
can be national which does not preserve the faith of the 
people; and also the form, for every national literature is 
canonical. And the kind of literature which lived last and 
longest in Israel was prophetic, and without God, prophecy 
which, as understood in the schools, concerned the future, 
could not be. And "apocalyptic literature" so turns back 
upon the past as to find there its models and ideals ; and so 
projects itself into the future as to make the future resemble 
the past it imagines. There is thus a past which is literary, 
it implies; and a future it, prophetically, describes. It 
finds the link between the two in the God who guides all 
things in heaven and in earth according to the counsel of 
His own will ; and as the past it knows, by study only, be- 
longs to a people which was always weak as a nation, it has 
to speak of the world as a tyrant which seeks not only to 
oppress the people of God, but in a way that conceals its 
mind from the oppressor. Hence ' ' apocalyptic literature ' ' 
speaks of the future in terms it draws from the past, and of 
the present, which represents an oppressive reign, either in 
symbolical or emblematic terms. 

4. The apocalyptic teaching of Jesus has these qualities : 
it is given ''privately," in response to questions which the 
disciples put;* it is in the nature of prophecy which con- 
cerns the future;! it is cast in a form which reproaches 
a tyrant, without naming him; J it belongs, too, to Jeru- 
salem.! In it He warns men not to be deceived by false 
* ' Christs " ; 1 1 the coming of the ' ' Son of Man ' ' is secret. 

* Matt. xxiv. 3 ; Mark xiii. 3. f Mark xiii. 7 ; Luke xxi. 10. 

J Matt. xxiv. 6, 7. § Luke xxi. 20-21. 

II Matt. xxiv. 5, 23-4, 27; Mark xiii. 21; Luke xxi. 8. 



JERUSALEM AND FINAL TEACHING OF JESUS 445 

But the final teaching of Jesus has peculiarities of a 
broader and more general order. 

(i) It is concerned with the future to an unusual degree 
— unusual in His case. The parables He tells, * the ques- 
tions He answers,! the positive instruction He gives J has 
this purpose in view. We may say, then, His teaching 
throws its emphasis upon the future and on the judgment, 
which is conceived as a moral event through its moral issues. 

(ii) The question of worship and of man's adoration of 
God, occupy Him. Hence it is the temple and its worship 
which mainly attract Jes%is; and their whole meaning for 
the church is what here mainly concerns us. His Passion, 
which is strictly personal, is its foundation. Hence what 
bulks so largely in His final teaching is the mystery of His 
death. Hence we here expound, though from an historical 
point of view, its meaning. 



The Death of Jesus 

IV 

I. The history which describes the Passion of Jesus 
Christ is made up at once of facts and allegory : a narrative 
of events which happened in time, yet the symbol of truths 
whose home is eternity. Calvary is like a stage where 
is seen in progress a tragedy that condenses as into a mo- 
ment the mystery and the meaning of the universe, ex- 
prcvssing the innermost mind of the everlasting Father, yet 
revealing the powers that contend round and for the im- 
mortal soul of man. 

The still pool or the solitary tarn may, as it looks into 
the silent face of heaven, reflect either the innumerable 

* In Matt, xxi and xxv. f Matt. xxii. 23. J Matt. xxv. 31. 



446 THE PASSION OF JESUS AND HIS DEATH. 

Stars, or the radiant sunshine, or the passive moonHght; 
and so the Crucifixion is Hke a glass in which we may see 
standing together, for contrast and comparison, two infin- 
ities, the winsome grace of God and the hideous evil of man, 
especially in the undisguise it wears when it feels conscious 
of victory. But things never are what evil thinks them to 
be: — they are not like thought immortal. "There they 
crucified Him," and though they did not mean it, their 
cross made Him all the diviner and more imperishable. 
Calvary can never more fade from the eye, or be razed from 
the memory or be plucked from the mind of the world, 
without, indeed, its heart being at the root. And the Cross 
owes its attractive power to the fact that man has come to 
read it, not through its hated setting, but through the con- 
sciousness of the Crucified. He had come to Jerusalem to 
die, for there only could the last of the Prophets be offered 
as the most perfect of all the Sacrifices. He had foretold 
all He was to suffer at the hands of the chief priests and the 
elders, and He had foreseen the Cross standing at the end 
of His way of sorrow. But He did not think of it as the 
penalty of a crime, rather as the symbol of the death by 
which He was to give His soul a ransom for many. 

2. The thoughts that moved Him found expression in 
the intimacy of the supper table. There He had told His 
disciples that He was ''to shed His blood for the remission 
of sins." He rose from the supper and He left the cham- 
ber, feeling as a victim anointed to the sacrifice; and He 
entered Gethsemane. The life was over, the death was 
at hand; He had ceased to be His own or even to 
be man's, and had become altogether God's. Yet 
the mode and moment of the offering sore troubled Him. 
The idea that the* death which was to save man was to be 
due to the crime of men, penetrated Him with anguish 



GETHSEMANE AND THE SUFFERER FOR SIN 447 

and created His Passion. Though He had come for this 
hour, yet He shrank from the hour when He stood in its 
presence. But He shrank not because of the suffering it 
involved for Himself, but because of the reproach it was 
to cast upon the people He loved and for whom He was 
about to die. He cried to be saved from the hour, though 
He rejoiced that it marked the moment of His return to 
the Father. The sad and dreadful tragedy of His destiny 
seized Him, for while He was exalted by the love of one 
who suffered as a Saviour, yet He was pierced and pained 
by the agony of a sufferer who dies at the hands and by the 
hate of men. And that tragic collision of feeling grew 
fiercer all through the trial, which had seemed to the priest- 
hood a stroke of genius, yet whose swift-changing scenes 
He had to watch, the plottings of the priests, the vacillations 
of the procurator, the instability and the vindictive passion 
of the people, the weakness and the apostasy of the disciples, 
the faithfulness of the few, the pity of the women, and the 
dark and terrible irony of the whole. 

But if we analyze the elements that had been pressed 
into the cup He was to drink, we shall cease to wonder 
that He prayed the Father to let it pass. There are men 
who have thought that Gethsemane expressed the Saviour's 
fear of death. But in so thinking they read themselves 
into the moment, rather than read the moment through 
Him. What He feared was not the death, but the part 
sin played in the death, when there was added to the wanton 
mockery and hate of men the awful and agonizing idea that 
the very act by which He saved was an act by which they 
were to be judged and condemned. In this the mystery 
of the Passion lies. It describes the agony of the Saviour 
as He submits to the death which is to save men by sur- 
rendering Himself into hands that are swift to do evil. 



448 JESUS HATED BECAUSE SINLESS. 

It was the tragedy of infinite mercy that only by heighten- 
ing the sin of man could it accomplish his salvation. 

3. But the attitude of the priests and rulers to Him was 
not as His to them ; it was the attitude of men who needed 
a victim and cared not for the rights or the agonies of the 
victim they needed. They feared,' and so they hated; 
they hated, and so they crucified. This does not mean 
that the men were wicked, but only that they were zealous 
for the claims and dignity of their ofhce, and jealous of the 
Man who was making it seem superfluous or mean. It does, 
indeed, seem strange that men should have seen anything 
to hate in Jesus, still stranger that they should have been 
capable of so hating as to be willing to crucify Him. Was 
He not holy, harmless, undefiled and separate from sinners? 
But there is no reproach to a bad man's badness like the 
goodness of a good man; there is nothing that reproves 
a false priest like a true priest's truth. And so the men 
who had no claim to the holiest office were provoked by the 
character of Him who had received in the highest possible 
degree the vocation of God. They therefore called a 
council and considered what they should do with One 
whose words were troubling their State. The policy which 
commended itself to them was formulated by the chief 
priest: **It is expedient that one man die for the people, 
and that the whole nation perish not." * What he meant 
was that their craft was in danger, and that it was better 
that He who endangered it should die than that their 
craft should cease. He did not ask why One who was in 
character and function a true priest of God should endanger 
the priesthood that had risen by the ordinances and for the 
convenience of men. It was enough for him to know that 
his office and his order were threatened, to feel justified in 

* John xi. 50. 



WISDOM AND CUNNING ARE TO BE DISTINGUISHED 449 

sacrificing the blameless and beautiful Person who was 
the unconscious cause of danger to ''the nation," i.e. 
* * the priesthood . ' ' And his words seemed to the assembled 
council the voice of wisdom which as applied became high 
statesmanship. Yet cunning is the contradiction of wis- 
dom. The cunning man is a disguised fool, driven to seek 
the readiest way of escape from the consequences of his 
own folly.* And so the council was composed of simple yet 
cunning men, whose mean expedient of crucifying Jesus 
caused, without saving the people, the supreme tragedy 
of time. But it occasioned the coming of a Divine re- 
venge. Jerusalem, anxious for her own safety, perished; 
round her the Roman drew his iron and impenetrable 
lines ; her proud temple and her lofty towers were levelled 
with the dust, and she became a smoking ruin, with barren 
salt sown upon the place where Zion once stood, ''beautiful 
for situation" and the "joy of the whole earth." But 
love of the Crucified has given her an ideal and eternal 
existence in the faith of men. Athens, the eye of Greece, 
may stand to all ages as the home of beauty and of culture ; 
Rome, the seat of empire, may have seemed the symbol 
to her own people of eternity, as to us of political power; 
but Jerusalem is, above all other cities, the symbol of 
religion, and over the very turmoil in which she perished 
we seem to see stretched the sceptre of eternal righteous- 
ness. And this idealization she owes to the Cross ; Calvary 
has made her sacred for evermore. 

V 

I. It is needful, then, to distinguish the accidents of the 
death of the Saviour from His Passion, and the Sacrifice 

* This passage is a reminiscence of one in the Miscellaneous Thoughts of 
Jonathan Edwards, where he credits the devil with cunning, but denies him 
wisdom. 
2 G 



450 THE PRIESTHOOD AND ITS IRONICAL GENIUS. 

which was all His own. Man's part added to the sufferings, 
but not to the merit of the sacrifice or the efficacy of His 
work. Men contributed the setting; but His person created 
and constituted the act. Their part sprang from the lower 
passions which characterized Satan when, looking into the 
moral feebleness of selfishness, he said, "Skin for skin; 
yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life."* Christ's 
act came out of the grace which, "though rich, yet for 
our sakes became poor, that we through His poverty 
might become rich."t And each part so relieved the 
other as to heighten the collective effect. 

2. Thus, when the priests had secured not only His .cap- 
ture, but also His trial and His condemnation by the Roman 
governor, their vindictive anger, as by a stroke of iron- 
ical genius, contrived the means at once of expressing 
their spite and of increasing His pain, (i) He had spoken 
of God as His Father — and certainly if ever such 
a name for God fell fitly from a human tongue it 
was from His. And He had described Himself as God's 
Son — and if ever man could think of any one as Son of 
God then it must be a person such as He was. But the 
priests, when they had Him on the cross, helpless, van- 
quished, dying, gratified their lust of hate by breaking 
into jibes: "He trusted in God : let Him deliver Him now 
if He desireth Him." "If Thou art the Son of God, come 
down from the cross." (ii) They had seen Him work 
miracles — and did not dare to deny the miracles He 
worked, though they had tried to explain them by invoking 
the power He had come to overthrow. But now they had 
discovered the limits of the power they feared: it had 
availed for others, but did not avail for Himself; and so in 
their delight at the discovery they went to and fro before 

* Job ii. 4. t 2 Cor. viii. 9, 



SIGNIFICANCE OF THE CROSS FOR JESUS 45 1 

His cross and cried, "He saved others, Himself He cannot 
save." (iii) They had seen that He was without blame, 
and they had been silent when He asked them whether 
they could convict Him of sin ; but now they had found a 
way of making Him seem guilty of the sin they had failed to 
discover. When Pilate had set before them Jesus and 
Barabbas and asked which of the two they wished to have 
released, they had chosen Barabbas, the "robber";* and 
had left Jesus to endure the cross and bear the reproach of 
being the greater culprit. And when He was led forth to 
die they placed Him between two "malefactors," as if to 
damn Him still further and to drench His holy name in the 
associations of hateful crime. They imagined that they 
had made it impossible for those who had loved and followed 
Him, and lived in the light of His magnificent eye, to idealize 
the form or glorify the nature of Him whose sun had set on 
the cross, tarnished and blackened as by two immense 
clouds of darkness standing on each side of His glory, the 
"malefactors" who were crucified with Him, "one on His 
right hand and the other on His left."t As they looked on 
their handiwork, they may well have thought that they 
were indeed victorious men, for had they not seen by the 
grace of their own craft their foe perish? 

3. But had these priests never read in their own Psalms, 
"Surely the wrath of men shall praise Him"? J And if 
ever the wrath of men broke into a song that glorified God, 
it was now. All the acts suggested by the genius of hate 
became at the touch of the Crucified changed into signs 
and occasions of grace. Jesus on the cross behaves like 
the Redeemer of the world. What had been designed to 
mock and insult Him turned in His hands into a new oppor- 

* John xviii. 40; cf. Luke xxiii. 19-25; Mark xv. 7-1 1 ; Matt, xxvii. 15-21. 
t Luke xxiii. ^t, ; John xix. 18. J Ps. Ixxvi. 10. 



452 WHAT THE MOCKERS AND THE 

tunity for the expression of Divine love and truth. 
(i) They mocked Him when He cried in His agony Hke one 
forsaken of God: for how could He as man descend into 
the darkness of the grave without the common human 
shrinking before that darkness and at the touch of its cold 
and awful hand? But, whatever sense might feel, how 
could God forsake the spirit of His Holy One ? And has 
He not shown how near God had come to Him in death w hen 
He recalled Him from the grave and exalted Him to His 
own right hand? (ii) His resurrection is no child of the 
human imagination, without any meaning or warrant save 
such as it owes to eye-witnesses ; it is a fact of Divine inspira- 
tion and spiritual experience. From then till now He has 
lived and reigned, and been to the ages that stand between 
Him and us, not only living, but the very cause of their life, 
(iii) The men who mocked gloried in having found the 
limits of the power which He could no longer use to insult 
their impotence. But the hour of miracles was for Him 
only beginning : the reign of His grace was to have as its 
symbol the very instrument they had expected to extinguish 
His name. For at His touch the cross lost all its associations 
of horror and crime and death, and gathered round it the 
attributes of a pity that never slumbered, a mercy that 
never failed, a love mightier than the grave. He received 
it steeped in all the shameful memories of the scaffold where 
crime had expiated its guilt ; and He transmuted it into the 
symbol which has been carved on the tomb of those we 
have loved and lost, to express a hope that lives in the face 
of death ; and a symbol which has been borne on the breast 
of the crusader or the banner of the warrior, to speak of 
a victory that could know no defeat; which has marked 
on the field of battle the spot where carnage ceased and 
where began the ministry of healing which knew no man 



MALEFACTORS FOUND IN JESUS 453 

as friend and none as foe; but as a man who, wounded, 
needed to be nursed, or as the sick who wanted to be cured, 
or the dying who waited to be consoled. It is a symbol, 
too, which has been made to adorn the grave of the mar- 
tyred saint, or to speak to a race lost in evil of a God that 
could not let it go or leave it to perish in its s n. (iv) The 
very ''malefactors" who had been selected to overshadow 
His fame, and give infamy to His end, were made to illus- 
trate the grace that dwelt in Him in the very hour and 
article of death. They were placed the one on the right 
hand and the other on the left, that like two pillars of dark- 
ness they might the more utterly quench His light; but 
His light shone through the darkness and made the pillars 
luminous with infinite significance. The one malefactor 
realized his sin and sorrowed unto penitence; while the 
other, craving a life he did not deserve and never had hon- 
oured, passed through his impenitence to a death he was 
too hardened to fear. 



VI 

I . The whole story of the Cross thus turns into a Divine 
allegory. Jesus stands in the midst of time and of sin, 
with a world touched into penitence on His right hand, and 
on His left a world hardened into impenitence and shame- 
lessness. He touches both and is touched by both, while 
both show their essential qualities at his touch. The most 
offensive things that mockery could imagine and hate 
could do but seemed to make His face, even in its sorrow, 
radiant with a love too divine to be extinguished. If, then, 
the Cross be read as at once fact and allegory, event and 
symbol, what are the ideas it expresses to us ? 

(i) It shows that the Cross is common to man; and 



454 THE TRINITY OF SUFFERERS ON THE CROSS. 

each of us has first to bear it and then be borne on it. The 
three who were crucified together formed a strange 
trinity of sufferers: the bad man who as impenitent 
loves and clings to his badness; the bad man who 
as penitent abhors and renounces it; and the holy, 
the beautiful, and the gracious Son of God, stand 
together in the fellowship of pain, are joined in the 
common brotherhood of the Cross. Evil casts a shadow 
across the universe from which even God may not escape. 
The little child that does not know its right hand from its 
left, knows pain and death ; the hero who would rather die 
a thousand times than have his name tarnished by dis- 
honour, falls a victim to the revenge or cowardice or greed 
of some mean and contemptible traitor; the fond and 
trustful woman who loves neither wisely nor well, is made 
the victim of some base man's lust, and becomes an outcast 
from the society that will neither forget nor condone her 
sin, though it will hasten with soft and willing feet to for- 
give and forget the guilt of her seducer; the simple and 
the unworldly who have a little money to invest, trust it to 
some commercial vampire who lives on the blood and 
substance of the simple, then lose it all, and come face to 
face with gaunt and pitiless poverty. The Cross has many 
forms ; it is universal, it stands in every highway and by- 
way of life; and in all we meet men who bend under its 
weight, and carry the bier that will yet carry them. 

(ii) And while the Cross is common, it is unequal in its 
pain and pressure, like a burden unevenly distributed on 
the shoulders of men. The stalwart villain carries a weight 
he hardly feels; he is carried by the cross without caring 
for its shame, while he hardily bears its pain. The gentle 
and pitiful carry their cross and feel it a burden beyond 
their strength. They fall before their Calvary is reached. 



WHY DID THE HOLY SON OF GOD SUFFER? 455 

exhausted by the steepness of the way. And it is heavi- 
est of all where the blamelessness is most complete. 
He who ought, if holiness had meant enjoyment, to 
have gone through life gaily as to the sound of minstrelsy, 
bears the saddest and most tragic Cross of all time, a Cross 
which can be represented neither by the wooden instru- 
ment of death, nor by pierced hands and feet, nor wounded 
side. This Cross cannot be measured or weighed or figured, 
for it is inner, the sorrow of the heart that breaks for sin, 
the pity which turns the vision of evil into a suffering that 
is sacrifice. 

2. But here a question too grave to be passed unnoticed 
calls for discussion. Why did the Holy Son of God so 
suffer ? In this question there are several principles, chiefly 
two: (i) Why, in a world which love made and which 
righteousness governs, do the innocent suffer with the 
guilty ? and (ii) How does the Sorrow of the Saviour stand 
related to our salvation ? 

(a) The principle that must guide us in our answer to 
the first point may be stated thus: Man makes sin, but 
God sends sorrow, and where the sin has been made no 
more beneficent messenger than sorrow can be sent 
even by Heavenly Grace. Were there no suffering in 
a world where evil is, it would mean that its Sovereign 
cared as little for the evil as for the good; that He was 
indifferent to both, and views without concern the de- 
parture of man from the obedience that is holiness and 
peace. He sends suffering that He may chastise the evil- 
doer, and move him, through the knowledge of his sin in 
its fruits, to a penitence which he would otherwise not 
dream of seeking. Dark is the shadow which sin has cast 
upon time; and our world, as it wanders through space, 
lies cold and bleak in the night wind that rises from the 



456 WHY DOES THE INNOCENT SUFFER FOR THE GUILTY? 

swamps of its own wrong, and comes laden with damp 
mists and death. But across the dark there runs a golden 
band of sunhght, that grows ever wider and falls with ever 
directer ray upon the sore heart of the weary vagrant ; and 
this band is made by the sorrow which comes from God 
and leads back to Him. (/3) And there could be no remedial 
suffering for the guilty unless the innocent suffered with him. 
For are they not both of one kin ? and how is it possible 
that the kindly innocent could be without sorrow when he 
sees his sinful kin enduring the chastisement that is his 
due? Blood is thicker than water; the bond it forms 
between men is strange and potent and infrangible, and will 
not allow those of one blood to be indifferent to each other's 
fate. , (7) Sin is certain to pain the good more than the 
evil; and transgression may well be a more terrible 
thing to an archangel's eye than to a devil's experience. 
On the white face of the snow a black spot will seem more 
densely black than when it lies against a background 
faded and flecked and grey. And so to the soul that has 
never sinned evil will seem a darker and more hideous thing 
than it will to the soul that has never seen holiness or cared 
to see it, that has no associations of unsullied white to 
bring out the dismal blackness that lies around and lives 
within it. 

3. The suffering of the innocent with and for the guilty 
has a twofold significance: (i) it is the touch of nature 
which shows the kinship of the good with the evil; and 
(ii) it is the effect of the clear and single eye that, seeing 
sin as it is, makes holiness mourn for guilt, (i) And in 
the suffering which is thus caused there lives a remedial 
power. The sinful never so know their sin as when they 
see sorrow for it incorporated in one who did no evil and 
yet suffered from the wrong. The sight of a father going 



LOVE REPLIES TO THE QUESTION 457 

down in sorrow to the grave, his hair whitened with shame 
for sin he never committed, his heart broken with regret 
for wrong he never wrought, has wakened remorse in 
many a profligate who had never known he had a con- 
science and had but gloried in his shame. The sudden 
apparition of a mother seeking a fallen daughter — as 
Mary may have sought her buried Lord — and not able 
to see for her blinding tears, has sent the daughter weep- 
ing back into her yesterdays, seeking the innocence she 
knew in her childhood and lost with her happier days. 
And so the Cross, speaking to men of the Passion of God 
for their sin, sets them, as it were, back in the heart of 
Deijy, and therefore causes them to see sin as with the 
Divine eye, to judge it as with the Divine conscience, to hate 
it with a Divine hatred, and to avoid it with the unconscious 
serenity and sureness of the Divine will, (ii) And the mys- 
terious force by which the Cross compels man to feel sin 
as God feels it, it does not lose with the lapse of time. The 
farther we travel down the ages the nearer the Cross comes 
to us: the flight of time is a movement towards it. Its 
memory does not fade with the years, but we can say of it 
what was said of a more earthly love, 

Time but the impression stronger makes, 
As streams their channels deeper wear. 

The infinite grace that speaks in it moves with a swifter 
step than soft-footed time even in its most rapid strides. 
It is indeed to state no paradox, but only the most obvious 
fact, to say we feel nearer the Cross and the Crucified 
to-day than did the Roman centurion who cried as he wit- 
nessed the last agony of the Saviour, "Truly this is the 
Son of God."* 

* Matt, xxvii. 54; Mark xv. 39; cf. Luke xxiii. 47. 



458 TO DESCRIBE THE SUFFERERS IS TO 



VII 

I . But we must turn from this digression — if digression 
it be — to the persons and events described in the sacred 
history, which together answer the second question. 
As we continue looking at those who were crucified 
together, their differences in character are invested with 
more significance than their similarity in fate. It is 
strange how little we know of these malefactors; they 
touch Jesus at the moment of His death, and the touch has 
made them immortal. Who they were, and what their 
names, from whom they had descended, where they had 
been born, and where they had lived, or what they had 
done to bring them to the cross, we know not; we only 
know that they were crucified with Him. Yet can we be 
said to know a man if all we know is a single moment or 
event in his career? No moment stands alone; it is the 
child of an innumerable multitude of moments that went 
before it, and the parent of an innumerable multitude that 
will come after it. And unless we can read it in its connec- 
tion we cannot interpret it. For it is impossible to cut a 
section out of a man's life, isolate it, and understand it in 
its isolation. It is only as it rises out of his past and creates 
his future that it has for us any intelligible meaning or 
speaks to us any vital truth. How, then, can we know these 
men without a past, living before our eyes but for a single 
brief moment? Malefactors they may be; yet why did 
the one remain impenitent, and why did the other become 
penitent? What made the one blind to the significance 
of the Saviour and the other as if he were all one open vision 
sensitive to the truth, we cannot tell. 

Still, we may construct for them a possible past to ex- 



ANSWER THE SECOND QUESTION 459 

plain their present difference. We may, then, imagine 
that rather more than thirty years before this fateful 
moment three children were born to three several mothers. 
Birth, indeed, is everywhere a marvellous thing. We 
speak of the world as old, but it never can be old so long as 
young life continues to rise within it. The last new child is 
to the last new mother as wonderful as was her firstborn to 
Eve, when she exclaimed, ''I have gotten a man from the 
Lord. ' ' * Birth keeps the soul of the world young, touches it 
with wonder, fills it with the love that is akin to religion. 

2. And if we think of these three births as happening 
near each other in space and in time, yet we may not 
think of them as all alike wonderful to the imaginations 
of the persons who saw the little children come. 

(i) The first of them we may suppose was born to a hunted 
woman in a cave where wild men, outlaws, enemies of order 
and justice, had made their home. In the inaccessible hill- 
country the robber had his haunt, and in the cave where he 
dwelt there blended one day with the voices of the lawless 
men, whose only use for the name of God was to garnish 
the frequent and brutal oath, the piercing yet helpless cry of 
a babe. And the babe grew into the child, who heard only 
the savage voices round him, speaking their wild minds 
or breaking into fierce curses; and as he knew no other 
men, he learned to think their thoughts, to conceive society 
as they did, as an organized hypocrisy; the honest man 
was but the plausible knave who acquired in a secret, silken 
way the goods which the robber by open and manly violence 
possessed himself of, in order that he might serve, if not 
the common, yet his own peculiar weal. And so the child, 
having no opportunity to become a being of another order, 
grew even as the men were, learned profane speech as his 

* Gen. iv. i. 



460 THE BIRTH OF THE MALEFACTORS 

mother tongue, heard no noble thoughts expressed, saw no 
chivalrous deeds done, but, inured from childhood to 
profligacy and to wrong, he grew into crime, committing 
it as one to the manner born, who knew no law save the 
will of the robber chief who by the fear of his strength and 
the love of plunder ruled the wild men of the cave. 

(ii) The second child we may imagine as born about 
the same time in the house of a priest or rabbi. Wonderful 
he seemed to the mother, trained to think of the Lord as 
"the Giver of every good thing";* wonderful he would 
have seemed to the father had public duty ever permitted 
him to think of his own child. By day the father had to 
minister in the temple at the altar, or to attend the San- 
hedrin, or to do some one of the multitude of things that 
fell to him as a priest or ruler of the people ; and when he 
came home at night he was too fretted, too weary or wor- 
ried, to care to see or to teach his boy, who, untamed by 
a masculine and authoritative mind, grew up, indulged 
but undisciplined, petted, uneducated, the apple of a 
mother's eye, the neglected incident of a father's life. 
He learned in earliest days to repeat by heart the psalms 
or hymns the mother loved. But he was wayward, and 
she feared that the inflexible father, if he knew the way- 
wardness of the son, would be more inflexible in his be- 
haviour and severe in his punishment than even was his 
wont. So she hid the boy's misdoings, till in a moment 
of unwonted temptation he committed a misdeed that 
could not be hid ; and he fled from his home and the con- 
sequences of his act to the society of the wild men in the 
hill-country and to the shelter of their cave. And 
so it happened that the two men, who had been 
born so far apart, had lived together, robbed together, 

* Cf. James i. 17. 



AND THE BIRTH OF THE CHRIST 46 1 

together been captured and condemned, and now together 
they had come to the cross. 

(iii) But very different had been the character and history 
of the third Child, though by a tragic mischance He seemed 
joined in final fate with the other two. He had come to 
bring ''peace on earth, good will toward men."* But 
He brought these gracious gifts by enduring hate, insult, 
and insolence at the hands of men; what has been 
described as "the contradiction of sinners."! He lived 
in beautiful simplicity as a child, in holy obscurity as 
a boy, doing His father's business while nursed in the 
piety of an humble home; and in due season He be- 
came the Teacher, the Master in Israel, the Light 
and also the Life of the world. But there is nothing 
so impatient of difference as convention, nothing that can 
so little bear to be crossed or thwarted as custom; and 
the very preeminence of His goodness made Him hateful 
to men whose conventions had authority, whose customs 
were law, but whose natures were neither humane nor holy. 
And they hated Him for His truth, they disliked Him for 
His goodness, and they were jealous of the admiration the 
people gave to His words and acts. But they were men of 
public dignity and place, and so, clothing their hate in 
judicial forms, they tried Him by a standard which, while 
it did not apply to His character and claims, yet legally 
brought Him to the cross. 

3. And so these three, so unlike in history, so. much more 
unlike in character, now meet together in what seems an 
identical fate. 

But this fateful association affects each of the three per- 
sons in a strikingly dissimilar yet most characteristic way. 
The character and the person of Jesus at once declared them- 

* Luke ii. 14. t Heb. xii. 3. 



462 THE IMPENITENT HARD TOWARDS THE HOLY. 

selves by acting on the two malefactors as a discriminative 
and separative and judicial authority. The association of 
the two evil-doers had but tended to increase their activity 
in crime and their pride in violence; but their association 
with Jesus revealed most significant differences between 
them — showed how in one the evil that would not respond 
to good hardened into impenitence, and how in the other 
reminiscences of good surviving amid evil broke into peni- 
tence and a confession that at once ennobled the man 
and exalted the Saviour. The association, then, is not due 
to insignificant accident: the malefactors have each a 
function splendidly fulfilled: they form a background 
which throws into relief the person of Jesus, and helps us to 
see into His spirit and read the meaning of the Passion 
whose outward expression is the Cross. 



VIII 

I. There is first the impenitent man: he has much 
to regret, but he regrets nothing; worthy of death, 
he yet confronts it thoughtless as to his past, careless 
as to his future. While blame is most of all due to 
himself, he yet blames the Blameless, and rails as if 
the fault were His; though divided from Jesus by as 
vast a gulf as separates hell from heaven, he is 
yet so unconscious of the difference and the distance be- 
tween them that he dares to associate himself with the 
Christ in the demand, ''Save Thyself and us." * The man 
has so lived as to learn nothing that was worth learning, 
even concerning himself. He does not know the godlike 
possibilities once latent in his own nature; he is blind 
to the infinities within as well as around him, to the 

* Luke xxiii. 39. 



THE PENITENT SOFT TOWARDS THE GOOD 463 

true nature of the evil he has done, to the guilt and 
the misery which indulgence in it had brought. He can, 
Hke other fools, "rush in where angels fear to tread"; 
and with equal shamelessness, on the one hand, mock at 
sin, though only to find at the bitter end the mocking thing 
it can make of him; and, on the other hand, he scorns the 
pity which, undiscovered, beats and breathes beside him, 
potent in the Divine strength to help even on the cross. 
The man had suffered, chastisement had come to him as it 
comes to all ; conscience had spoken, truth had pleaded for a 
hearing; but he had loved evil, had followed crime, and it 
had led him to the bitterest of all ends, where he stands face 
to face with death, blind to the Divine pity that suffered 
by his side, railing at it because it loved him too well to lift 
him back into the life where he would be free to sin once 
more. It was better that he should go into eternity, and 
there learn to think more truly of himself, his sin, and his 
God. 

2. The penitent is a man with a past in which good and 
evil had so mingled as to affect his present and the attitude 
his mind assumed to death and the cross. His memory is 
so charged with reminiscences of the higher things he had 
once learned, as well as the baser things he had done later, 
that the two currents meet, conflictingly, in the experience 
of his final moments. And here he is able to find in the 
latter a test to determine the character and the quality of 
the baser things. And he is so conscious of the wickedness 
of his past, of the guilt of his present, of the awful event 
which forces a spirit clothed in its crimes into the dread 
mysteries of death and eternity, and, above all, into the 
presence of the Eternal Judge, that he is in a mood 
to be touched by the pitiful tragedy of the Cross. He feels 
that men who bear it ought not to rail at one who bears it 



464 THE TWINS IN DEATH AND THE CHRIST. 

with them; for they are ''in the same condemnation," * 
and ought to feel the solemn sanctity of their com- 
mon shame, and sorrow, and calamity. For himself, 
he knows that he deserves to die; his crimes have 
made his cross, and now he blames not the cross but the 
crimes. "We indeed [die] justly, for we receive the due 
reward Of our deeds." f But in the very degree that he is 
conscious of his own evil he perceives two things : (a) how 
that evil intensifies the tragic significance of death, and (/S) 
how it magnifies the goodness of Him who is dying without 
crime — the Man who ''has done nothing amiss." To be 
twins, born of one mother, with the same blood in the veins, 
to have lain in the same bosom and drunk from the same 
breasts, is to be alike not simply in descent and home, in face 
and feature, but so akin in spirit and in temper as to be 
nearer and dearer to each other " than common man is to 
common man." But to be twins in death, born into eter- 
nity at the same moment, and by the same event, is to have 
a sanctity that will abide for ever. And still more remark- 
able than his vision of the sanctity of the moment is that of 
the sacredness of the Person beside him. A man who dies 
because he is too good to live must be as far above the ordi- 
nary level and customary ideals of the multitude as one who 
dies for his crime is below them. And so this man's moral 
eyes are opened, and he sees a wonderful thing — the Christ 
in the Crucified; while behind him there stretches a dark 
and gloomy past, there is beside him a radiant and holy 
Person, and he sees between the dark and the bright the 
rainbow of promise, the beautiful arch of God, adown 
which the celestial messenger of peace travels with its 
message of grace to his spirit. And through the light this 
made about his soul the man beholds beside him the Victor 

* Luke xxiii. 40. f xxiii. 41. 



THE SINLESS CHRIST SEES THE DEATH IN THE TWINS 465 

over Death and the Grave and the Cross. '^Lord, remem- 
ber me when Thou comest into Thy kingdom."* 

3. But if these two men are distinguished by evil in the 
one being hardened and good in the other evoked and 
vivified by the person of Jesus — they, in their turn, com- 
bine to make Him more lucid and intelligible to us than He 
had been before. He has no evil to regret; He is not 
haunted by a past that holds Him by the twin hands of hor- 
ror and remorse. He is all radiant within, though there is 
behind and about Him a background of desertion and 
shame. Love dwells within Him ; obedience has built for 
Him the Cross. The Father whose apparent desertion had 
forced from Him an exceeding bitter cry, is near Him, for 
had not angels come to strengthen Him in the Garden? 



IX 

I . But all the more because of the radiant holincwss within 
He sees the meaning of the scene which is proceeding before 
His face. The scorn of the priests, the anger of the people, 
the hateful cries of the men who hate the more that their vic- 
tim is He from whom they had expected the redemption of 
Israel — all have a meaning plain to His clear and open 
sense. Yet of all things the least possible to present to the 
human imagination is the consciousness of our Lord at this 
supreme moment of His passion. But let us try to think of 
what He may have experienced under some material form. 
Let us imagine an immense spiritual being, sensitive through 
and through, under the figure of an enormous canopy 
stretched over the earth. On the upper or convex side of it, 
turned towards the serener and more radiant heaven, there 
falls the everlasting sunlight which is the smile of God. It 

* Luke xxiii. 42. 



466 THE SOUL WHICH IS THE CANOPY OF EARTH 

hears the songs of the angels in Paradise, is swept by the 
wings of ministering spirits, and thrilled by feeling near it the 
celestial hosts who have come to succour Jesus in His sorrow. 
But its concave side, w^hich is turned to earth, hears the 
groans and sighs, the curses and the mad laughter of time. 
The oath of the man who thinks of God only as the minister 
to his hate ; the prayer of the woman forsaken of love and 
bearing within her the legacy of lust; the wild song of the 
drunkard; the.mocking prayer of the hypocrite; the spiteful 
and vindictive cries of the successful plotter over his victim 
— these all rise and penetrate the cave which bends like an 
immense arch of life over our earth. And then, as the 
upward tide of piercing and painful sound meets the down- 
ward tide of radiant and harmonious bliss, can we imagine 
the miserable joy, the happy delirium, the awful passion 
of emotions in which love and horror blend; each in its 
own degree transcendent yet so interfused as to create an 
indecomposable and indescribable unity in that listening 
spirit? Even such was the cross to Christ and Christ on 
the cross. Need we wonder why He broke into the cry, 
'' My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me? "* Must 
it not have seemed as if the rampant evil of earth had not 
simply contradicted but overwhelmed the radiant God of 
heaven? But the mood out of which that cry came passes; 
and as the cry dies away two things emerge, speaking of 
the infinite faith that bade the Saviour rejoice in the very 
hour of His passion. The one was His word to the dying 
and penitent thief, "To-day thou shalt be with Me in 
Paradise" ;t the other was His surrender of Himself to God : 
''Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit. "J The 
first signified that Paradise was to Him already an experi- 

* Matt, xxvii. 46. f Luke xx. 43. 

f Luke xxiii. 46; cf. Matt, xxvii. 50. 



467 

ence, present and assured, that He had power not only to 
enter it Himself, but to bring His faithful with Him. The 
second signified that when the shock of the colliding forces 
had passed, the hand of God still held Him, and He knew 
the face of God to be looking upon Him in everlasting 
tenderness. 

2. But we have not yet exhausted the significance of 
the Cross, and the figures which are so placed as to 
enhance the grace and the power of Him who is in their 
midst. The one malefactor shows us evil at its best; 
the other, evil at its worst. There are men, indeed, who 
think that the difference between them may be traced to 
the will of God, forgetting that a difficulty lifted from the 
will of man into the will of God is magnified rather than 
diminished . The difference, so far as their evil is concerned, 
must be sought in themselves, though the source of all good 
is to be found in God. The impenitent man shows evil at 
its basest, the heart obdurate, insensible, unconscious of 
its own quality and character and deserts. I have heard 
men describe the miseries which attend the deathbed of 
the ungodly, invoking in proof the cries of agony and 
despair with which they have splintered the drowsy ears 
of death. Voltaire is said — though falsely — to have 
begged a little more time for life and repentance: and the 
stricken sinner has asked for six months wherein to make his 
peace with the God he had all his life long been proud to 
despise and disobey. But these are hopeful and gracious 
signs: for there is something infinitely worse than the 
agony of a conscience that will not be silent in the face of 
death; there is the obduracy, the dumb indifference, the 
heartwholeness in the presence of mortality. The man who 
lives after a great sin as if he had never sinned, and who 
dies in the odour of respectability and is buried amid the 



468 EVIL AT ITS BEST AND WORST. 

praise of the conventional and well-to-do, is a more hope- 
less sinner than Cain, who cried, ' ' My punishment is greater 
than I can bear,"* or than Judas, who could not bear to live 
after he had betrayed his Master. Of this worst kind of 
sinner the impenitent thief remains the type. He dies a 
sinner who feels as if he had not sinned, believing that the 
best thing God can do with him is to save him from the 
death he deserves and let him live to do wrong as of old. 

3. But the penitent man shows evil at its best; the good 
nature resurgent within the bad, pleading to be saved from 
the body of death that it may become spirit and live as God 
liveth. And between these two we see Jesus in the moment 
of supreme agony tasting supreme joy, feeling His "thirst," 
feeling also His work to be '* finished," yet feeling that ere 
it can be described as ended the man who has spoken to 
Him in penitence and faith must be saved. And as the 
word he uttered speaks of Himself as well as to the d^dng 
man, we may imagine the two entering Paradise together: 
the Saviour with the penitent thief as the first-fruits of the 
saved. And when the saint new to heaven is met and 
guided through its crowded ways, the guide who meets and 
conducts him to the centre of light points out two figures — 
the Lamb on the Throne and one who humbly sits upon 
its steps ; and then he says, ' ' There is the man who in the 
hour and article of death believed on the Christ, and there 
is the Christ Who in the same hour saved the man." 

* Gen. iv. 13. 



VII 

PAUL THE APOSTLE OF JESUS CHRIST 

TT7HAT we have now to study is men who may be 
^ ^ regarded as fair examples of the material Jesus 
used to build His church of. We take two : one who was 
in the circle of original disciples and one who was not, 
John and Paul. With the last-named we begin, our 
purpose being to follow the literature of the New 
Testament. 

I 

I. Differences of character may be divided into two 
classes, which may be named, respectively, the acci- 
dental and the essential. Accidental differences, which are 
due either to history or experience, may be described as 
acquired ; while essential differences, which are made with 
the man and are as old as he, may be said to be either 
constitutional or implanted. What we have termed 
"accidental differences" may yet denote quahties of 
character as profound and impassable as those called 
"essential," and may well regulate history. But a further 
distinction, in order to greater precision of language, must, 
as a necessary consequence, be introduced : — The qualities 
termed "essential" are independent of experience and 
prior to personal history because they belong to the essence 
of the man and are created in him; but those termed 

469 



470 ESSENTIAL AND ACCIDENTAL DIFFERENCES 

"accidental" are dependent upon experiences and subse- 
quent to personal being. Now Paul had, as respects char- 
acter, both classes and kinds of differences. He was parted 
from Jesus and the older apostles by the class which we 
have termed ''accidental," and from Jesus Himself by the 
class we have termed "essential." The qualities we call 
"accidental" are distinctively Pauline, and express points 
where Jesus and the older apostles stand together opposed 
to Paul. But the qualities we call "essential," which 
denote personal and absolute differences, belonged rather 
to Jesus than Paul, and place Him in antithesis to all the 
apostles. 

2. Our first concern is with the qualities called "acci- 
dental," which distinguish Paul alike from Jesus and the 
other apostles : (i) Paul is proud of the fact that he, alone 
among those who made and founded Christianity, was born 
outside Palestine, and is able to speak as a native the tongue 
of the Gentiles, whose missionary he is.* He is a Tarsian, 
the man from Tarsus. f (ii) He is the only writer in the 
New Testament who boasts his descent from Jews.J His 
birth, as well as progress in Judaism, and his zeal for his 
ancestral traditions, are to him matters of pride. § (iii) He 
boasts also that he himself is a Pharisee and the descendant 
of Pharisees, 1 1 a convinced member of the narrowest and 
most zealous Jewish sect.^ (iv) He, as an educated man, 
is the only apostle who uses his Jewish learning to transcend 

* Gal. i. i6; ii. 8, 9. The very fact that Paul spoke the common 
tongue, which was a form of Greek, as only a native could, marked him 
out as a fit missionary. Cf. Acts ix. 15 ; xiii. 46; xv. 3, 14, 17, 19. 

f Acts ix. 11; xxi. 39; xxvii. 3. 

I 2 Cor. xi. 22; Rom. ix. 3, 4; Gal. ii. 15 ; Phil, iii. 5. 

§ Gal. i. 14; Acts xxii. 3, || Phil, iii. 5 ; Acts xxiii. 6-8. 

*[[ Acts xxiv. 3 ; xxvi. 5. Legarde, who cannot well be otherwise than 
ironical, speaks of him as a Jew and a Pharisee, even after he had become 
a Christian {Deuts. Schriften, 1886, pp. 71, 78). 



BETWEEN THE APOSTLES AND THE CHRIST 47 1 

Judaism ;* the man, therefore, who, as the one schoolman in 
the New Testament, is most intelHgible to the Rabbis, and 
the one they think they can best understand.! The fact 
that he, as an apostle, is skilled in the use of scholastic learn- 
ing, means that he alone possesses it. (v) He is the only 
apostle who claims to be a Roman citizen,! and he alone 
knew what the claim meant. § (vi) He is the only apostle 
who alludes to the fact of his conversion, which he ascribes 
to God. He separated him from his mother's womb and 
called him through His grace; || and he testifies that the 
only good the church knew of him was that he "preached 
the faith which he was wont to destroy."^ (vii) While 
God made Paul like the other apostles out of the clay 
whereof ordinary men are fashioned, yet we may say that 
He took extraordinary pains with his education. He meant 
him not only to understand the Gentiles, but the Christ he 
had to preach.** Now Jesus and the men He called to be 
His apostles, who were one and all natives of Palestine, were 
also distinguished from Paul as uneducated and untutored ; 
men who had gone out to seek comfort of John, and were 
''baptized of him in Jordan, confessing their sins.^ff 

3. Jesus in essential quality of being stands distinct alike 
from Paul and the older apostles ; i.e. he is separated from 
them by qualities and traits which may be described as at 
once personal and essential. (i) History moves in the 
region of senses which are yet too intellectual to be wholly 
sensuous ; and it deals with what, as adventitious and inci- 
dental, can be seen and handled. Jesus seems to stand 
above Paul by virtue of His spirit, which is built of rarer 

* Gal. i. 14. t 2 Cor. xi. 6; iii, 6, 7, 13, 14. 

J Acts xvi. ^6, 37; xxii. 25-28. 
§ Acts xvi. 38, 39; xxii. 29, 30; xxiii. 27, 29, 30. 
II Gal. i. 15. ^ Gal. i. 13, 22, 23. ** Gal. i. 16. 

ft Matt. iii. 6; iv. 18; Mark i. 4, 5, 16-20; Luke iii. 3, 21; v. 10, 11. 



472 THE SYMPATHY OF THE SINLESS WITH THE 

material, and can, therefore, as more completely incorpo- 
rated with the race, in an exceptional degree, feel the sins 
and the sorrows of man, and by His sympathy share its 
weakness * 

(ii) History justifies the Pauline emphasis on the pity that 
moves Jesus, on His sinlessness, and His love for sinners. 
He pursues His solitary path, and strengthens us by what 
He endures, (iii) The ''essential" is more secret and sa- 
cred than the "accidental," what comes from within than 

* Dr. Thomas Chalmers is right in his quotation from Dr. Adam Smith's 
Theory of Moral Sentiments, though wrong in his statement that it was 
suppressed in all editions following the first {Bridgewater Treatise, pp. 
431-2). It was suppressed indeed, but in neither the second nor the third 
edition, which is the one I use. Wrong, too, is the statement that it was 
David Hume's influence with Adam Smith that caused its suppression. 
" Man conceives," said Smith, "how easily the numberless violations of 
duty of which he has been guilty should render him to Deity the proper 
object of aversion and punishment ; neither can he see any reason why the 
Divine indignation should not be let loose, without any restraint, upon 
so vile an insect as he is sensible that he himself must appear to be. If 
he would still hope for happiness, he is conscious that he cannot demand 
it from the justice, but he must entreat it from the mercy of God. Re- 
pentance, sorrow, humiliation, contrition at the thought of his past mis- 
conduct, are upon this account the sentiments which become him, and 
seem to be the only means which he has left for appeasing wrath which 
he knows he has justly provoked. He even distrusts the efficacy of all 
these, and naturally fears lest the wisdom of God should not, like the 
weakness of man, be prevailed upon to spare the crime by the most im- 
portunate lamentations of the criminal. Some other intercession, some 
other sacrifice, some other atonement, he imagines must be made for him, 
beyond what he himself is capable of making, before the purity of the 
Divine justice can be reconciled to his manifold offences. The doctrines 
of revelation coincide in every respect with the original anticipations of 
nature ; and as they teach us how little we can depend upon the imper- 
fection of our own virtue, so they show us at the same time that the 
most powerful intercession has been made, and that the most dreadful 
atonement has been paid, for our manifold transgressions and iniquities." 
In order really to appreciate the above we must recollect that to Adam 
Smith the fundamental "moral sentiment," which is the parent of all 
moral action, is sympathy ; and sympathy, with him, means the feeling 
which so identifies the person who feels with the actor and his action, 
and those on whom it terminates, as to share all its moral consequences. 



SINFUL MARKS THE PERSONALITY OF JESUS 473 

what comes from without, because connected with higher 
mysteries of being ; it incorporates the ideas which may be 
termed the factors of the person and personaHty of Jesus. 
In history Jesus is a Jew in whom the reHgion of Israel re- 
Hves and is personahzed. (iv) He so repeated and repro- 
duced the stages in the history of His people that the very 
gospels themselves can be read as if He were but a reflection 
of events in Judaism. Thus in the first gospel Jesus em- 
bodied "law and prophecy," and He lives a life which can 
best be explained through the joint action of these two forces 
upon His people His history is conceived as the fulfilment 
of both law and prophecy : and His genealogy starts with 
Abraham, as if Jesus had no other end in life than to continue 
his seed and its history. In the second gospel He touches 
man and men touch Him, all the more that He comes to 
found a kingdom of grace and truth ; and it may be said to 
represent the method of Jesus, first in making disciples, next 
in founding His kingdom. The third gospel is like the first, 
though with this difference, that Jesus is conceived as man 
and not simply as a Jew. Hence its purpose is to describe 
His manhood as a factor in the life of the race — through 
Him man as a race attains unity. Hence the Lucan gene- 
alogy of Jesus runs back to Adam, and terminates in a Man 
called the ''Son of God." The fourth gospel shows how the 
personality of God and man have been realized in Christ, and 
that men must, in order to be men, conceive God as He is. 
(v) While the third gospel is more biographical — at least in 
the sense that its history is needed to explain Paul's conver- 
sion and his consequent thought — and so more Pauline 
than the fourth, the fourth is more theological than the 
third, and states more distinctly what Paul conceived Christ 
to be. Paul makes John possible, especially in the sense that 
without him John could not have written, though with him 



474 THE PAULINE CONTRAST OF JESUS WITH CHRIST. 

John could not but write. (vi) If we may draw out and 
emphasize a latent distinction, we may say, it is less with 
Jesus than with Christ that Paul is here placed in contrast. 
The Christ is indeed Paul's own creation, and we are so ac- 
customed to think of Him in terms which we owe to Paul, 
that it is not possible to conceive Jesus without also con- 
ceiving the Christ, (vii) Paul is described by a famous 
divine of the Roman church as "a saint if ever there was 
one." While that church has canonized persons of more 
dubious character, it has never canonized a person of cleaner 
morals or manlier manners. He may, indeed, be described 
as a saint without tenderness, a marble stoic, a man without 
a tear ; yet without him we should not have had, what may 
be termed, using a favourite Pauline axiom, the religion of 
grace. For without love no religion can be understood. 
To say so much is to say that the human soul is bound to 
endure the last loss, and be "accursed from Christ" if only 
man can be saved. 



II 

I . In explaining Paul we may follow one of two methods, 
and look either at the apostle through the man, or the man 
through the apostle. The danger of the one method is 
rationalism, of the other supernaturalism. As extremes 
are evil, we shall follow neither method; but study the 
man in a way we may term literary, where Paul is con- 
ceived as he is represented in his own epistles. We do 
not regard him as either an accident or a special crea- 
tion of Deity. He belongs to the order we know ; nature 
would not have been complete without him, nor could 
he have been without nature. The mind he possessed 
made him the apostle he became; the faith he preached 



DISTINCTION BETWEEN RELIGION OF JESUS AND CHRIST 475 

embodied his ideas. He translated the religion of Jesus, 
which was personal, into the religion of Christ, which was 
universal. He is to us, then, a man who has heard the call 
of God ; and His call can assume many forms . 1 1 may come 
through a man and be sealed by a council, or may be incar- 
nated in a vision which no one can see save him whose vision 
it is, or in a voice which can be heard by no other ear than 
by an ear attuned and listening ; but however it may come, 
the one thing essential is: — it descends from God. Be- 
cause of its origin or source, it has an authority so sovereign 
and ultimate that neither man nor council can cancel it. I ts 
effect is to make the new man equal to work the old man 
never could have performed. It coordinates energies that 
had, by contending against each other, paralyzed his 
strength. Where God has once spoken He can again speak ; 
where He has been welcomed He neither ceases to visit 
or to grow weary. The call is no miracle ; it happens in 
conformity with the personal capacity of the man; his 
social environment and history are its antecedents. It 
comes, not like a flash out of a cloudless heaven; but is 
rather like the creative word, which was never so natural 
as when it took shape in plants and animals and men, bid- 
ding each be and bear fruit after its kind. 

2. Paul's conversion and apostleship were neither arbi- 
trary nor accidents which happened through the action of 
God ; the visions which came to him he had the imagination 
to see, the mind to understand, and the clear conscience to 
enforce. There may seem an infinite and quite impassable 
distance between the young man who watched the stoning of 
Stephen, and guarded the clothes of them who did the deed, 
and the grave preacher who heard in the Macedonian man's 
cry the voice of Europe call to him. But the gulf which 
yawns between the two men is not so wide as it seems ; for 



476 THE WORLD AROUND THE MAN 

they are more like than unlike. The man has throughout 
an open ear, and he has the will to obey. Out of sincerity a 
saint may be made;* out of insincerity the only creature 
possible is a devil. 

3. Our discussions assume simply three things: (i) the 
world around the man, (ii) the man within the world, and 
(iii) the nature he received. God makes great personali- 
ties, and the personalities He makes make history. With- 
out them history would be but a stagnant pool, which never 
knew living water — either movement towards good, or any 
good to move towards. A great people may have strong 
and noble impulses, but unimpersonated impulses, which 
means impulses unincorporated, speedily die out and ig- 
nobly perish. Thus without the Homeric genius the spo- 
radic and limping ballads of the Greek peoples would not 
have been woven into the epic, with its march as of the in- 
exorable tramp of many thousand feet; and unless they 
had broken into its resonant measures, they would have 
either died with the people who made them, or sur- 
vived in the dried soul of the pedant or for the curious 
lore of the antiquary. Man without imagination may 
know the past without knowing men, and so nothing 
would more surprise him than a hint that they had ever 
lived. The tales of mean hate and impetuous love which 
dilettanti wrote either to break the fevered monotony or 
charm away the fancied cares which made life an in- 
tolerable burden to idle and languishing Italian dames, 

* The author of the Acts makes Paul confess and attest two things : — 
(i.) That he had lived before God "in all good conscience" (xxiii. i), 
which is, as he himself says, "to have a conscience void of offence" 
toward God and toward man (xxiv. 16). (ii.) As he had lived before God, 
he had lived before men, and the men he had lived before were too honest 
to condemn their brother. The author of the Acts is entirely faithful to 
what Paul writes concerning himself. Cf. Rom. ix. i; xiv. 14; i Cor. x. 
29-31 ; I Thess. ii. 20; v. 9 ; Gal. i. 13, 14. 



AND THE MAN WITHIN THE WORLD 477 

would not, without the genius of Shakespeare, have be- 
come, in our Enghsh speech, tragedies which hold our very 
reason in awe. Without great men, then, the ideas which 
shape and govern man are, as unimpersonated, impotent 
and incapable of change into realities which all men may 
know. And so we argue that the hero is not created by any 
process possible to man, but directly by God, especially if 
He be conceived as the Teacher of man by making heroes, 
who cannot be better defined than as workers together 
with Him. These heroes, then, are great personalities who 
are allowed to help in evolving out of the potentiality, 
which is the Creator's work, the living actuality which is 
the man's. This change is worked by the action of two 
mysterious forces, which are both created of God, though 
operated by men, which forces we name, respectively, 
(i) descent and (ii) environment. Descent represents the 
action of God in time; environment the action of God in 
space. Behind the great men, running back through cen- 
turies of forgotten sorrows, unrecorded disciplines, abortive 
achievements, are the generations of their unremembered 
ancestors. Round the great men is a society or medium in 
which the latent potency they are born with may be de- 
veloped into the power they are intended to become. Now 
these two forces each had a part in the being of Paul. He 
was a Jew, which is equal to his descent; he was born in 
Tarsus, which is simply his environment. 

4. There is the place, which appealed less to the Jew in 
Paul than to the man. Tarsus created an appreciation of 
manhood which lifted him above the prejudices of race. 
It was a city historical and famous, old yet young, 
like other Greek cities at once intellectual and mer- 
cantile. It had varied ambitions, and wished to emulate 
in its schools the fame of Athens; and so founded 



478 THE CITY IN WHICH HE WAS BORN. 

academies where art and poetry and philosophy and ath- 
letics were cultivated, as well as whatever promised to 
train the mind or exercise the body. In commerce Tarsus 
desired to rival Alexandria ; and endeavoured to accumulate 
riches by sending the wares of the East into the marts of 
the West. But while the city as regards population was 
Greek, it had also been conquered by Rome; and so its 
citizens belonged to the mightiest empire on the face of 
the earth. Its courts, where Roman law reigned, were 
jealous of their decisions, for the law there administered was 
proud enough to distinguish between Roman and provincial ; 
but the men who inhabited the provinces were all alike 
subjects of Rome, which was too proud to establish 
differences amongst provincials. Beside the Greek, and 
under the Roman, lived the Semite ; and though the Semitic 
men were numerous, yet the speech of the city was not 
theirs. The man who w^as a Semite had a long memory, 
an ancient ancestry, equal pride of birth and blood to 
either Greek or Roman. 



Ill 

I. And this city was the birthplace of Paul. He is 
the only writer in the New Testament of whom we can 
say with certainty that he was born, bred, and educated 
in a city full of Greek men, yet under the law of Rome. 
This alone would make him unlike Jesus, who, though He 
is simply reported, and has written no word, yet is be- 
trayed by His speech as a man born in a land of villages 
rather than cities, and who speaks to rustics in rustic vspeech. 
There is nothing in the Pauline letters so full of majesty 
and the sense of harmony which lives in nature as the 
famous comparison of the lilies of the field, which grow with- 



JESUS SPEAKS AS ONE BORN IN THE COUNTRY 479 

out care, toil not and do not spin, to Solomon in all his glory 
who was yet not arrayed with such pomp and seemliness * 
(i) Paul, indeed, while he speaks neither of the sparrow on 
the housetop,! nor of the will of the Father who counts the 
very hairs of our head, J views life in the way that becomes 
a city-born man. Jesus feels the potency of the individual, 
Paul his impotence. The philosophy of history, if we may 
so speak, we owe to the one is a philosophy based on the 
eminence of the individual ; but the system we owe to the 
other is a philosophy based on human impotence, or the 
potent man as but one in a multitude. Men, as a rule, 
are formed and fashioned as the city knows them. In 
other words, Christ's notion of man is the countryman's 
notion ; but Paul's notion is the city's, which conceives man 
as a mere atom, and as an atom without power to mend 
things, (ii) While Jesus sees men standing in the market- 
place,! seeking work,|| and speaking of the sky and 
the weather of to-morrow, If or the children playing in 
the streets at being men,** it is the cattle, whether in 
the field or in literature, which attract Paul,tt who 
knows that they are heavy-laden beasts, and bear 
burdens heavier than they ought.JJ (iii) Jesus makes us 
feel that land and sea alike are bright with Divine love; 
but Paul that he has never seen the land lying radiant 

* Matt. vi. 28, 29 ; Luke xii. 27. 

f Psalm Hi. 1 1 ; and cf. i Sam. 45 ; 2 Sam. xiv. 1 1 ; Matt. x. 29-32 ; 
Luke xii. 6, 7. 

X Matt. X. 30; Luke xii. 1-24: xxi. 18. 
§ Matt. XX. 3. II Matt. xx. 4-7. 

^ Luke xvii. 20 ; xi. 29, 30 ; xii. 39 ; xxi. 7 ; Matt. xii. 39 ; xvi. 1-4. 
** Matt. xi. 16; Luke vii. 32. 

ft The ox was always a favoured subject with the Mosaic law; cf. 
Ex. xxi. 28 ; xxii. i ; Lev. xvii, 3. Paul refers to the " ox which treadeth 
out the corn," i Cor. ix. 9; i Tim. v. 18; cf. Deut. xxv. 4. 

IX For God's care for "cattle," see Ex. ix. 3-4, 6-7; x. 26; Jonah 
iv. II ; Ps. 1. 10; xxxvi. 6; i Cor. ix. 7-10. 



480 BUT PAUL WRITES AS CITY BORN AND BRED. 

in the sunlight, or the beautiful green of the fields, and 
has not heard the waves break into their multitudinous 
laughter. Jesus says that seed must die in the soil in order 
to be a symbol of the resurrection ; * but while Paul uses the 
same figure, it is to him literary, studied in books, never 
from observation. Jesus sees man in the concrete, pities, 
loves, redeems him ; but Paul thinks of man in the abstract, 
as a being who, in creation's distress, turns his expectant 
gaze towards the unveiling of ''the sons of God."t (iv) 
Paul's imagery, so far as it reflects his own experience, is 
taken from the city, and speaks of houses as the city knows 
them, of palaces that are gay with gold and silver, or of 
the workman's cottage which stands built of wood and 
thatched with hay or straw ; J and of the mother who feeds 
the child, especially with milk, which is the food of the 
babe ; § of the earthenware vessel on the hearth, the mirror 
on the wall, the platter on the table. 1 1 He knows the tutor 
who leads his pupils to school past the rows of busy shops, 
or through streets where in glory the triumphal procession 
makes its way. ^ (v) His images reflect the life of the sol- 
dier, with which every ancient city, especially so far as it was 
Roman, was familiar — the trumpets that are blown,** the 
accoutrements and arms with which the man is equipped ,tt 
and the money he receives from an impecunious treasury, 
(vi) And he also, as becomes a man trained in a city devoted 
to the study of Roman law, speaks a legal language,JJ 

* John xii. 24, Jesus, over and above this reference, has six allusions 
to wheat or sifted corn ; and these show how He has observed the whole 
process of sowing. Paul has not one ; i Cor. xv. 36-38 is only a literary 
reference. 

f Luke xvii. 33 ; Rom, viii. 19. 

X I Cor, iii, 12-13. § i Cor, iii. 1-2, 

II I Cor, xiii. 11-13; 2 Cor. iii. 18. ^ Gal. iii. 24-25. 

** I Cor, XV. 52; I Thess, iv, 16. ff Ephes. vi, 11-17, 

XI Rom. viii. 15-17; Gal. iv. 1-3. 



AS A JEW DEVOTED TO HIS FAMILY 48 1 

and shows himself the son of a father who was a 
Roman citizen and who transmitted his status to his son. 
(vii) He speaks also concerning the theatre and amphi- 
theatre and the race-course in terms which were natural to 
him, as a civilian, as the country to Jesus ; his images are all 
urban and unlike those suggested by the rural life of 
man. 

2. But Paul was a Jew, and of all men in the ancient 
world the Jew was the most devoted to his home, and the 
most tenacious of his distinctive character and religion.* 
He then was born of this race, and grew as a child amid 
surroundings that tended to deepen the affection for the 
tribe. We can imagine him carried to the synagogue as a 
child and taken to it as a boy, where he heard the law re- 
cited, the Psalms chanted, the history of his race narrated 
and explained .f He thus came to know himself as a mem- 
ber of a people God had chosen, J though man despised. § 
And Paul had to mix with boys who were of his own age, 
though of another race; and he mixed with them as one 
who, though despised, may not despise again. He wit- 
nessed with pleased approval the religious processions which 
expressed the Greek sense of the fit and the beautiful ; but 
Greek religion he could not think of otherwise than with 

* We can estimate the devotion of the Jew to his home by the place 
he assigned to woman. When the Old Testament is ransacked for hints 
of prehistoric marriage customs, there is a danger that its actual doctrine 
may be lost. The place and will of the woman is recognized in the nar- 
rative of Isaac's marriage. Gen. xxiv. The place of woman is also 
illustrated by the position of Sarah in Abraham's household. The ideal 
which determined the reality was stated in Gen. ii. 20-25 ; on this was 
based the command of God, Ex. xx. 12, 14, 17 ; Deut. v. 16, 21 ; Joshua 
ii. 24; and such stories and statements as Judges iv. 4 ff. ; Prov. xi. 16; 
xii. 4; xiv. i; Mai. ii. 14; Josephus, Antig., xii. 4, 6. Paul himself 
agrees in i Cor. vii. 3, 14; xi. 3-6; Eph. v. 22-25, 28-31; Gal. iii. 28; 
Col. iii. 18, 19. f Philo, vol. ii., pp. 327, 328. 

X I Cor. i. 23-29; Gal. ii. 15. § Rom. ix. 28, 29; xi. 2, 3, 25, 26. 

2 I 



482 PAUL ONCE LIVED AMONG GODS WHO WERE NONE. 

scorn. He learned to admire their art, without admiring 
their reUgion. Round him may have Hved men who spoke 
rapturously of the Zeus of Phidias, or of gods this and that 
man had made, carving them out of cold marble ; but the 
God he believed in was one who lived and reigned. He saw 
with the delight of a boy the Greeks playing in their games ; 
but their love of bodily exercise he held in high disdain. 
He listened to the literature they liked to quote and the 
lines they loved to recite ; but he thought of the Scriptures 
which his own people possessed and knew, the Psalms which 
they sang in praise of their God, the prophetic words which 
they recited when their faith was low, or the histories 
which described the actions of Deity in terms that were 
felt as a sacrament. He heard the philosophers discourse 
of wisdom, of truth and the search for it; and he remem- 
bered the perfect wisdom his people conceived as the fear 
of the Lord. 

3. The chief men of the city boasted an ancient ancestry, 
but his descent was more venerable and illustrious than even 
theirs, for had not his people been old when Greeks and 
Romans alike were still young ? The great empires of the 
world, whose fame was in every mouth — Egypt with her 
hoary civilization commemorated in the pyramids and 
temples, in her habitations of the dead and of deity, her 
mysterious wisdom, her religion, so outwardly coarse but 
inwardly so refined; Assyria with her winged bulls and 
fallen palaces, and once extensive rule, which had made 
her an abiding name ; Persia with her vast armies, ambi- 
tious and wasteful kings, who came so near being pious, yet 
so fatally missed piety ; Greece with her everlasting child- 
hood and speculative wisdom, and philosophy which was 
the mark of manhood, and literature which ever since has 
been classical and will be classical as long as time endures ; 



WHERE HE MEETS GREEK PRIDE WITH A GREATER 483 

Rome with her invincible legions and her imperial law, on 
which was engraven equally her love of conquest and of 
men — what were they, one and all, but moments in the 
being of the Eternal, allowed to be by God for ends which 
were His and not theirs? Paul, therefore, met the pride 
of the Greek with a greater pride; he confronted their 
beautiful real in the strength of a more splendid ideal. 
For their pride was the vanity that sought dignity through 
dress, forgetful that a beggar does not cease to be a mendi- 
cant though clothed in the crimson robes of a king ; but his 
was the pride that sought dignity in mind, and could see it 
reign as a king though clothed in rags. And so he looked 
at the city — its art, its culture, its fashion, and its religion 
— and he said : ''These things shall perish all, but the city 
and law of our God shall stand for ever." 

4. The lad was miserable enough, but in due season deliv- 
erance promised to come ; the hour approached when he was 
to go up to Jerusalem, and study the law of his God in the 
schools of the great masters. It was a moment when he 
could realize the dream which had touched with beauty 
both his sleeping and his waking hours; and became so 
blissful that time was filled with a poetry which redeemed 
earth from all its prose. If we have known what it is to live 
with no other society than philistines, — men that seem to 
us hard and uncongenial, because unable to comprehend the 
ideas we most cherish, and because they cannot but regard 
with hatred what they fail to understand — we can imagine 
the joy of escaping out of hands so unconsciously cruel into 
the hands of men who know and love the ideals that are 
our life. If we have never experienced these things, yet 
have imagination enough to represent their action in the 
soul — then we may know something of the feelings that 
inspired Paul when the hour came that he should go up 



484 PAUL IN JERUSALEM DISILLUSIONED. 

to Jerusalem, and with the hour came the summons which 
called him. She was to him Zion ; * on the law of God the 
people meditated day and night.f Into her the men who 
defiled and made a lie Were not permitted to enter ; { the 
redeemed of the Lord lived there, § and there the invisible 
presence was so the sun that illumined and warmed the 
city as to make the citizens feel as if they walked in a per- 
petual day, while the unhappy heathen slumbered in what 
was believed to be the outer darkness.! I 



IV 

I . But if the joy of deliverance exceeds all joys, the pain 
of disillusionment is the most bitter of all miseries. And 
disillusionment was to be the fate of Paul. Residence in a 
pagan city had vexed the soul of the boy ; but the stay in 
the ' ' holy city " brought a deeper trouble into the conscience 
of the youth. The Roman was there ; his soldiers walked 
the sacred streets and guarded the city gates; his judges 
administered justice, and his procurator governed in 
Caesar's name the temple which was God's. And the place 
he ruled he had corrupted with a corruption that reached to 
the ministers of religion. The priests had become masters 
of statecraft, balancing themselves uneasily between forces 
that ever threatened to collide, between a sullen and ob- 
durate people possessed of impossible ideals, and a jealous 
empire resentful of insults, an empire which had conquered 
and meant to rule. Even the man who sat in Moses' seat, 
the guardian and interpreter of his law, the guide and in- 
structor of the people, had fallen from his proud preemi- 

* Isaiah Hi. i, 2, 7; lix. 20; xlviii. 2. 

t Ps. i. 2; Ixiii. 6; cxix. 48, 78, 148, J Rev. xxi. 27. 

§ Isa. Hi. 9. II Rev. xxi. 2-4; xxn. 3-15. 



THE CITY DIVIDED ABOUT JESUS 485 

nence and become a mere waiter upon events, a man on 
the outlook for any sign by which Providence might indi- 
cate the way in which the people should go. 

2. And just as the youth reached the city an event was 
happening which was destined to make every man and 
sect appear in his and its true colours. High discussions 
went on daily concerning the character and mission of 
one called Jesus of Nazareth. Some affirmed and others 
denied that He was the Messiah; some testified that 
He had claimed to be the Son of God; others that He 
had said He would destroy the temple; others that He 
had done many mighty works; and all, that the people 
believed in Him, and expected Him to do great things. 
They were prepared to follow wherever He might lead. 
Consternation reigned; the priests feared collision with 
the Roman soldiers ; the Pharisees were in terror lest their 
doctrines and their influence should alike suffer; while 
jealous Rome watched all, and held her legions in reserve. 
The high-priest proved himself a man of resource and 
action ; for he so sacrificed Jesus to Rome as to save his own 
order and the people. The Pharisee showed himself a slave 
of theory and the school ; for he could not ask Rome to act 
without recognizing her right of action, which would have 
been a denial of his theocratic belief and messianic hope. 
So the priest and the Roman crucified Jesus, while the 
Pharisee looked on in isolated yet approving disdain. But 
His death raised new problems, which, as more puzzling 
than those connected with His life, divided the sects the 
more and perplexed Paul. For rumour, selecting a point 
where the difference between the Jewish sects was both 
pronounced and keen, began to tell that Jesus had risen 
from the dead; His disciples said He had; the priests 
said He had not; the Pharisees, here again enslaved by 



PHARISEE AND SADDUCEE AND THE RESURRECTION. 

theory, 'hesitated, would have doubted, and even denied 
had they dared. The priests, who were Sadducees, said: 
''There is no resurrection";* therefore ''for a dead man 
to rise again would be a violation of the laws of nature; 
but these laws, which are God's, cannot be broken, since 
the Creator Himself shows them the respect of obedience." 
But the Pharisees, who affirmed the opposite, could only 
say : ' ' Whether this man has risen from the dead or not, we 
cannot tell ; the question is one of evidence, which must 
be proven before an assembly of reasonable men before 
any faith can be demanded of us." Gamaliel, who repre- 
sents this attitude of mind,t said: "Leave those men 
alone ; if their work be of man it will be overthrown ; but 
if their testimony is of God no man will be able to over- 
throw it." God was to be left to prove the event true 
or false, while the men whose function and duty it was to 
seek and find the truth quietly waited and watched whither 
Deity was to lead. 

3. This attitude was peculiarly distasteful to the young 
scholar; for he was a man of inexorable reason, who hated 
to do anything by degrees, particularly in the region of 
the mind, where he believed in being thorough. He was 
by training and conviction a Pharisee, but this attitude of 
mind which the Pharisees of Jerusalem cultivated his soul 
abhorred. He had come from Tarsus, where the Jew was 
hated and his religion despised, to a city which loved the 
race and admired the religion, that he might study the law 
of his God. But under the man at whose feet he had come 
to sit mutiny had ripened, and finally rebellion had broken 
out. Moses was being smitten in his own house ; his law 
unenforced seemed virtually repealed ; the customs he had 

* Acts V. 17; xxiii. 6-8; Josephus, Antiq., xiii. 5-9, 10, 5-6. 
t Acts V. 34-39- 



WHETHER GOD COULD RULE THE CITY 487 

established or sanctioned were neglected, and the head of 
Paul's school and of the Pharisees was saying: ''This is 
God's affair ; let us leave it all to Him." Two countrymen 
of mine once issued from a scene which had not been gov- 
erned by sweet reasonableness, and the one said to the 
other: ''This is a mad world; God mend all." "Nay, sir," 
came the response, "we maun help Him to mend it." Ga- 
maliel's policy was : ' ' Let God mend all, the whole world as 
well as what it contains." But our formula ought to be, as 
was Paul's: "We must help Him to mend it." 

4. But how was he to help ? His own sect stood aside, 
watching in masterless inactivity; their ancient enemies, 
the priests, seemed to be in earnest, and at least knew their 
own minds. In theory Paul agreed with the Pharisees, 
but in fact he worked with the priests. He believed in 
the resurrection — in the abstract ; but in the concrete 
he did not believe that Jesus had risen. And did not this 
mean that Moses was superseded ? And for such a super- 
session were he and Judaism prepared? And how was 
the belief in Christ's resurrection to be suppressed save 
by the suppression of His people? And how could they 
be suppressed otherwise than as He had been, by death 
and the cross? We think tolerance reasonable, and 
so it is to men with English history and Christian beliefs. 
But there is a mood of mind to which tolerance seems base 
treason ; and to it correspond the two ideas — (i) that 
religion is a statutory law which no man can be allowed 
to violate at his pleasure, and that (ii) it assumes a po- 
litical body created expressly for its use, and identical 
with the State. The idea need not be ignoble, for the 
man who can kill for his faith is near akin to the man who 
can die for it; and it is from men who have killed that 
we have learned the nobler duty of living and letting live. 



THE MAN WHO GOES AMONG THE CHRISTIANS 

This, then, was Paul's idea as he faced what he conceived 
as the great apostasy from Judaism, and he thought the one 
thing faith demanded of him was to arise and kill. But 
the man of integrity is also a man of open mind, for there 
is no person so incapable of conversion as the man without 
convictions; no man is ever in a more hopeful mood than 
he who possesses the consciousness of veracity and does 
not doubt another man's. 

5. So our hero went in among the Christians to perse- 
cute, but stayed to learn. To keep the clothes of the 
men who stoned Stephen was to hear Stephen's words, 
and they were words certain to illuminate a man who saw 
in Israel only a form for Providence. But more illuminative 
than the words of Stephen was the man's own experience, 
which, like a mirror whose veracity he could not question, 
showed him the motives that moved him, the ends he pur- 
sued, and the self who pursued the ends. And he saw all 
as they must seem to the eye of God. In a man's deeds his 
thoughts are incarnated and, as it were, objectified for his 
own inspection and knowledge ; and when Paul contrasted 
his own incorporated faith with the faith of the men and 
women he haled to prison, a suspicion as to the truth of 
his beliefs and the piety of his mood and the purity of his 
motives began to possess his mind. And it was only natural 
that the more he suspected himself he should the more per- 
secute, until his zeal against the Christians became zeal 
against the thoughts that were rising within him. This 
inner conflict soon made Jerusalem intolerable to him, for 
he could not live there and cease from persecuting; and to 
persecute became daily less and less possible, especially to 
persecute those whose faith at once quickened his doubts 
and reproached his unbelief. Hence feeling as if he might 
by changing the scene avert the impending change and 



TO PERSECUTE REMAINS TO LEARN 489 

continue his deadly policy, he went to the high-priest, 
begged letters for Damascus, and took the way thither. 
But on the way the vision he had been seeking to escape 
from came; he saw, "as one born out of due time," the 
Lord, and found He was one with the Jesus he had per- 
secuted. The vision was a call, and the call was God's 
tribute to the man's integrity, to the good, though ill- 
informed, conscience in which he had lived. There are men 
who, in the manner of all superior persons, persecute reli- 
gion by professing to tolerate it. But there is nothing so 
blind as intellectual vanity, and to it no vision is ever 
granted. We have all at one time or another taken the way 
to Damascus, fleeing from the conviction we fear and wish 
to avoid ; but the fear may be illusory. The vision comes 
to none but the man of sincerity all compact, seeking the 
light he loves that he may do the will of God, though it may 
be a will he does not love. 

V 

The vision may be named the experience which made 
Paul a Christian apostle. But he was altogether too reso- 
lute a man to be satisfied with an approximation to the 
perfect. His preparation, which was at the same time a 
probation, was still incomplete, and without its completion 
no ministry could be named apostolic. 

I . He retreats into Arabia ; he seeks solitude in the 
desert, where he can be silent and think. The vision has 
made him a new creature ; without the old things are passed 
away, within all things have become new ; and so the changed 
man does not at once understand the changed universe into 
which he is born. The heart within must be wedded to the 
nature without, and before he can see truly his eyes must be 
accustomed to the new light; for if the eyes fail to see the 



490 THE LESSON OF THE RETREAT INTO ARABIA. 

truth, how can the tongue describe it ? It is said that in 
every young Melanchthon there is an old Adam, and the old 
Adam is never so potent or so cunning as when he induces 
the young Melanchthon to express himself concerning the 
mysteries of faith in premature and presumptuous speech, 
which is ever both flippant and impertinent. The man who 
has been found of God will live with sealed Hps until he 
knows something of the God who has found him. To go 
into silence, to wait till God penetrates the conscience and 
illumines the soul that the man may become luminous 
through and through, is our part in the economy of grace, 
and a sure sign that God intends truth to break into the 
world through us. So Paul is called to an apostleship, and 
must understand alike what the call and what the apostle- 
ship signify. We appreciate the man's homage to the truth 
and what it means ; to the God who has called and led him ; 
and what is the message he will yet have to deliver. We 
read the more carefully, we listen the more attentively to 
the man's voice in his epistles that we know he does not 
speak without thought, or till he has sojourned for years in 
the Arabian deserts. 

2. The solitude, which is at once preparation and proba- 
tion, has a second stage, which shows the need and the wis- 
dom of silence. He goes up to Jerusalem as a man who has 
seen God face to face, has heard His voice, and studied His 
speech till he has mastered its very accents. He has also 
looked at nature, at man, and at history, as well as at him- 
self and his mission through the truth he has received ; but 
what does he find without him and around him when "he 
essayed to join himself to the disciples"? Suspicion. 
''All were afraid of him, and did not believe that he was 
a disciple."* In the apostoHc church, and, indeed, in the 

* Acts ix. 26. 



THE TEACHING OF THE CROWDED CITY 49 1 

apostolic men, there was much of the very common and 
frail humanity we know so well, which finds it so easy to 
believe in the conventional, to doubt what transcends it, 
to walk according to custom, to think that what fashion 
has not sanctioned God does not approve. Hence when 
Paul came to Jerusalem the men who were "reputed to be 
pillars"* said: ''The young man, though his bodily pres- 
ence is weak, is no doubt both earnest and eloquent; his 
intellect is strong; his way of putting things is not ours, 
but is unusual and even audacious; but he cannot have 
authority in the church unless he be our delegate. Let 
him tarry awhile till his beard grows; once his docility is 
proved, we shall consider his case again and deliver our 
judgment." Each age has its own trials, but possibly the 
hardest to. bear is the disillusionment which overtakes the 
sanguine and the susceptible when contact with the real 
fractures the ideal. And of all disillusionments the sorest 
is the discovery that those we had esteemed as saints are 
mere mortal men, stained and flawed even as we are. And 
here, though the young disciple was disillusioned, yet he 
was not discouraged. He who had stoned men because 
they disagreed with him was now ready to be stoned him- 
self by those with whom he did not agree. He now saw 
what he was once too blind to see, that it was more blessed 
to be a martyr than to inflict martyrdom, — the faith he was 
glad to be judged worthy to illustrate. He had in Arabia 
so lived alone with God and His truth that he now measured 
man by the truth, not the truth by man; he so loved the 
truth as not to hate the men who loved it as well as he did, 
though, not having lived as long as he in the Arabian desert, 
they understood it less. The feeble in mind or in conviction 
may lose faith in God because bad men live around them; 

* Gal. ii. 9. 



492 PAUL RETURNS TO JERUSALEM FROM TARSUS, 

but a brave — which here means a good — man who has 
been charged with the conversion of the world will not 
falter when he finds that there are men in the church who 
need to be converted as much as if they lived in the world. 
So, though not Jewish enough to please the men "reputed 
to be somewhat,"* Paul turned to dispute against "the 
Hellenists," or Grecian Jews, men who were by birth and 
training like himself .f Hence came trouble, for "they 
went about to kill him" ; and so "the brethren," who were 
all conventional men and desired quiet rather than con- 
troversy, "brought him down to Caesarea, and sent him 
forth to Tarsus. "J 

3. And so the man came back to the city where he had 
lived as a boy, and looked with new eyes and a changed and 
chastened spirit at the men around him and at the problems 
they suggested. He had not lost his idealism because his 
older ideals had perished ; on the contrary, larger and sub- 
limer dreams had taken their place. He had ceased to be 
a Jew only and had become a man, a member of the human 
race; and the God he believed in did not belong to the 
Hebrews, but to all mankind. § And so there came to him 
a change of feeling towards man. He did not think of him 
as hating God, but as feeling after that he might find Him.|| 
As he confronted the Greek, and was himself a "Hebrew 
of the Hebrews, "T[ his intellectual vision was enlarged, 
and he saw truth as it lived in the mind of God, 
though with the eye of one who loved mankind. As 

* Gal. ii. 6. 

f Acts ix. 29. What the Hellenists, or Grecian Jews, were we know 
from Acts vi. i. Stephen was one of them, vi. 5 ; the qualities that make 
him a forerunner of Paul are indicated, vi. 8, and had to do with his 
death, vi. 9-14. He may have been born in the same city as Paul, vi. 9 ; 
their connection is evident, vii. 58 ; viii. i. 

X ix. 30. § Rom. iii. 29, 30. 

II Acts xvii. 27. ^ Phil. iii. 5. 



AND WHAT TARSUS TEACHES HIM 493 

he faced the Roman state, in the place where he had been 
free-born,* there rose before his imagination the ideal of 
an eternal city whose citizens were of the household of 
God.t Hence the enforced silence in Tarsus was even 
more educative than the solitude of Arabia had been, or 
the society that in Jerusalem surrounded the apostolic 
men and constituted the local church. For one thing, the 
silence was friendly to thought. In Arabia he was alone 
with God, in Jerusalem he was entangled in the controversies 
touching the old law and the new ; but in Tarsus he could 
think of God and man together, of man in search of God, 
and of God as without respect of persons or races, accepting 
rrian.J If he had remained in the desert he might have 
sunk into an impotent anchorite; if he had continued in 
Jerusalem he might have declined into a pro- Judaic or an 
anti-Judaic rabbi, polemical through and through, in spirit 
as well as in speech. But in Tarsus he won another temper, 
and achieved the mind that made him the apostle of Jesus 
Christ to the Gentiles. 

For Tarsus suggested new thoughts to the mind of Paul. 
We know enough of the place to understand its fascination 
for him. In Tarsus there were Greeks, Romans, and va- 
rious Semitic peoples, including Jews; its population was 
not simply mixed, but every class had its own religious 
ideas and home. The ideas were worthy of a city of mixed 
inhabitants. It is not a modern discovery that churches 
are improved by people being able to compare the more with 
the less noble ; but is as ancient as religion. So Tarsus felt, 
with this difference between the ancient and the modern 
point of view, that there was no rivalry between religions 
any more than there was between class and class, or citizen 
and citizen. They were ranged according to descent, as dis- 

* Acts xxii. 28. t Eph. ii. 19. f Rom. ii. 11. 



494 THE MISSION REACHES HIM IN A PERSON. 

tinct and different, not as contrary and opposed. Paul, 
therefore, in the discourses at Lystra,* and on Mars Hill,t 
and in the Epistle to the Romans,} gives an account of re- 
ligious ideas which sprang directly out of what he had ex- 
perienced as a citizen of Tarsus. What was needed, there- 
fore, was to set in motion his thought, applying it to the 
complex phenomena directly suggested by Tarsus. 

4. And the occasion which called Paul to a nobler and 
more characteristic ministry came not as before, in a vision, 
but in and through a person. Barnabas, which seems to 
have been his Christian name, and had quite superseded his 
racial name of Joseph, was a Levite, a native of Cyprus, 
and a Jew by descent. § He was, therefore, a Hellenist, 
born, like Paul himself, outside the Holy Land; and like 
him, therefore, a Grecian Jew, though richer than he,|| and 
descended from Hebrew parents, priestly by family. He 
was a rare and beautiful character, "a good man, full of the 
Holy Ghost, "If possessed of many gentle, gracious, and 
brotherly qualities. He seems to have occupied but a 
minor place in the early church, yet he did a greater 
thing than any of the original apostles — he discovered 
Paul. The man who knows a hero is second only to 
the hero he knows. He can discern spirits; secrets 
that lie latent in a silent man become patent to him. This 
gift of discernment Barnabas possessed, but in his case 
its value was enhanced by the presence of even rarer quali- 

* Acts xiv. 14-17. t Acts xvii. 22-31. J ii. 12-16. 

§ Acts iv. 2^, ij. There are many alternative explanations suggested by 
Klostermann, Dalman, Deissmann, and Nestle, but Luke's derivation seems 
adequate and satisfactory, especially if the phrase be rendered as "Son 
of exhortation." "Exhortation" was indeed a function of the prophet 
and the preacher. Acts xiii. 15 ; xv. 31 ; Rom. xii. 6-8 ; xv. 4-5 ; i Cor. 
xiv. 3 ; 2 Cor. viii. 4, 17. Of the thirty references in the New Testament 
to irapdK\T](ri.s all but three, which stand in Hebrews, occur in Paul and 
Luke. II iv. 37. ^ Acts xi. 24. 



BARNABAS SEES MUCH IN PAUL 495 

ties. He had, if one may so speak, the meekness that 
had characterized Moses; no jealousy of the meaner sort 
troubled his spirit. He saw and appreciated the strong 
man, and was happy if only he could provide him with the 
opportunity his abiHty deserved. He would, indeed, have 
been pleased had he been able to perform the work that 
was natural to Paul ; but he had the same feeling of self- 
abnegation which induced the Baptist to say as he re- 
garded Christ: ''He must increase, but I must decrease."* 
Behind his spirit lay also the faith that made the strength 
of behaviour, the conviction that Paul had in him the 
making of an apostle. This was the secret of his conduct at 
Jerusalem, where, when he saw the disciples stand aloof 
from Paul, he brought him to the apostles, and made him- 
self sponsor for the qualities that distinguished the man 
who was yet to be the apostle to the Gentiles.! But the 
apostles had little faith in human nature, especially if it 
differed from their own. And so Barnabas was sent by the 
Church at Jerusalem to work in Antioch.J He obeyed, but 
soon found the work too arduous for his strength. Then 
Paul rose before the memory and the imagination of Bar- 
nabas, and we read that ''he went forth to Tarsus to seek 
for Saul, and when he had found him, he brought him unto 
Antioch."§ 

VI 

I. But the Paul he found was different from the Paul he 
had met at Jerusalem. The man had suffered from men, 
and had learned by what he had suffered. He was changed, 
yet the same man. His experience had been twofold, (i) at 
Jerusalem, and (ii) at Tarsus, (i) At Jerusalem he had 

* John iii. 30. f Acts ix. 27. 

J xi. 22. . § xi. 25, 26. 



496 JEW AND GREEK JOIN IN MAKING AN APOSTLE. 

suffered a double disillusionment : — had seen by the help 
of the Jews through Judaism ; and by the help of the Chris- 
tians he had learned to know the possibilities of Christian- 
ity. He saw that Judaism could not be extended so as 
to embrace the Gentile; but what was impossible to it 
was possible to Christianity, which had in it the making 
of a universal religion. (ii) In Tarsus he had been wel- 
comed by those he had once shunned, and had seen the 
best side of Hellenic and Roman religion, and had also 
seen how little it differed from the higher Semitic beliefs. 
He may be said to have come out from Tarsus the second 
time much more advanced in his theology than when he 
issued from it before; and he was quite prepared to learn 
the lesson which Antioch was both able and willing to teach. 
Antioch in Syria was not as in Pisidia; it was unlike in 
history while like in character. Both were founded by 
Seleucid kings, and showed in their names the influence of 
their founders; but the Pisidian city was Phrygian, while 
the Syrian was Greek. The Syrian was near the sea, but 
no seaport; near the desert, but no link in the caravan 
routes that united east arid west. It was, small as its 
population is to-day, the third city in the Roman Empire, 
with the ambition to displace Alexandria, which was first 
in commerce as in wealth. 

2. We are not, therefore, surprised to find that Paul at 
Antioch first turned to the Gentiles, and to come upon 
traces of his larger ministry. 

(i) "The disciples were called Christians first in An- 
tioch."* The church had been a mere Jewish sect, not 
remarkable as such, with no large principle of life within 
it. But there it became the Christian religion incor- 
porated in Christian men. Christ's incorporation with 

* Acts xi. 26. 



PAUL AT ANTIOCH BROADENS CHRISTIANITY 497 

man became a symbol — creative, sovereign, distinctive — 
transforming the church into the religion of Christ. ' ' Chris- 
tian" is a hybrid word, partially Greek, partially Latin, 
yet expressing more than any word the idea of a religion, 
universal, catholic; the religion which incorporated the 
best elements in all the religions professed of men. As 
such it became broader than Judaism, and more able to be 
just to both God and man. 

(ii) /'The disciples, every man according to his ability, 
determined to send relief unto the brethren that dwelt in 
Judaea."* At the same moment that man's brotherhood 
was born — being witnessed to by the religion with the new 
name — there happened a second birth — man's responsi- 
bility for man, the conviction that distance did not divide, 
nor race distinguish, nor blood alienate; that wealth did 
not isolate from poverty, nor allow poverty to die in its 
want, for wealth was bound out of its own abundance to 
supply the brother's needs. Those who remember Paul's 
plea for help for the "poor saints" at Jerusalem,! i.e. for the 
men who lacked and who needed help from those who had 
in abundance ; or his rapturous thanks to God for ''His un- 
speakable gift, "J which closes his praise of Corinthian 
"liberality," will not need to be told that what the people 
then, prophetically, realized at Antioch, was Pauline. 
There was, indeed, no deeper or truer idea in Paul than this: 
he who helped the soul must also help to clothe the body. 

(iii) There is a still higher responsibility, also born in 
Antioch : — There was equal responsibility for the spirit and 
the body of men. The church had both in its charge; 
by following the one, its charity becomes philanthropic 
and as broad as man; by following the other, its love be- 
came missionary and universal. The voice of the Holy 

* xi. 29. t Rom. XV. 26; Gal. ii. 10; i Cor. xvi. 1-3. f 2 Cor. ix. 15, 

2K 



498 THE ENLARGED FAITH IS WHAT MAN NEEDS. 

Spirit said, therefore, to the church: "Separate me 
Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called 
them." * That work was what we know as ''conversion," 
which is the best of all missionary enterprises. And so the 
church at Antioch, when it "had fasted and prayed, and 
laid hands upon them, sent them away."t They went, 
therefore, as ambassadors of the church in the city which 
had first given to it the name "Christian," and so had lifted 
Christianity above being a mere Jewish sect; yet the 
two friends went in a gracious companionship. Paul was 
the governing mind, but Barnabas had the guiding heart ; 
and so it was but natural that they should seek first his 
native Cyprus,} and try there to win for Christ the people 
he first knew and loved most. Then there is the crossing 
to the mainland and reaching Pisidian Antioch, where Paul 
preached in the synagogue a sermon, which is simple, indeed, 
as a first effort both in structure and in plan, as in terms of 
thought; yet is prophetic of the epistles which were still 
imwritten, though later they were to be the first seeds of 
the New Testament, and to make the mind of Christendom. 
The Jews may have been jealous when Barnabas and Paul 
alike turned to the Gentiles. In Phrygian and Galatian 
cities they preached now to men so ignorant and super- 
stitious as to imagine they were gods, and now to men so 
hostile as to treat them as the worst of criminals. Yet 
everywhere the supremacy of Paul appears; he is the 
speaker, § the man who suffers equally from the anger and 
the applause of the multitude. || 

(iv) To the church at Antioch, which had originally 
* * recommended ' ' them * ' to the grace of God , ' ' they returned 
and rehearsed all that God had done by their means, and 

* Acts xiii. 2. t xiii. 3. 

X iv. 36; xiii. 4. § Acts xiv. 12. || xiv. 11, 14, 19. 



JERUSALEM WANTS TO RULE ANTIOCH 499 

then they abode long time with the disciples * Their suc- 
cess was so great that they felt they could not bind down 
the converts to observe Pharisaic Judaism; and so Jeru- 
salem took alarm at the door of faith being set so 
wide open to the Gentiles. Hence certain men came 
down from Judaea and taught the brethren, ** Except 
ye be circumcised after the custom of Moses, ye cannot be 
saved. "t With these men who so taught, Paul and Bar- 
nabas had, to the perplexity of the inexperienced, ''no small 
dissension and questioning" as to the right of Jerusalem 
to close the door in the face of the Gentiles, by saying that 
none could be saved who did not keep the law of Moses. 
They were, therefore, sent to the church at Jerusalem to 
lay the matter before **the apostles and elders."} What 
these counselled and decreed we know; it is written in 
the Acts of the Apostles. § 

3. But while the apostles and elders decreed a compro- 
mise which satisfied neither the Jews nor the people of Anti- 
och, what Paul demanded, and his reasons for demanding 
it, we can find in his four great Epistles written in the 
early part of his career. Whether, on the one hand, 
circumcision be needful, or, on the other hand,|| eating 
w^ith the Gentiles be necessary, is discussed once and for 
all in the Epistle to the Galatians.^f The question was 
really very simple, whether it was necessary to become a 
Jew in order to be a Christian, or whether a man, without 
being either inwardly or outwardly a Jew, could be con- 
verted and saved. There is something most offensive to 
the law of caste in a common table and a common meal. 
The spirit of class or sect may reign, but social distinc- 

* Acts xiv. 26-28. t XV. I. 

X Acts XV. 2. § XV. 13-22. 

II Circumcision is settled by the palmary instance of Titus (Gal. ii. 3-5). 

•|Gal. ii. II ff. 



500 UNITY OF MIND AND UNITY OF MANHOOD. 

tions which have no rehgious sanction do not become in- 
exorable social laws. The king and the noble, the peer and 
the commoner, the farmer and the peasant, the master and 
the workman, may all — and as a matter of fact do — here 
in England dine together ; and no one feels that he has done 
anything that calls for praise or blame. In India to-day 
caste may govern in food as well as in other things, so that 
what a man shall eat or drink, who shall cook or purchase 
it, who shall be present at the eating, wait upon or serve 
the man, who shall eat with the eater, or even who shall 
see him eat, however humble his fare may be, is regulated by 
the law that is most Divine. In the halls of English schools 
and colleges men of ancient lineage, and men whose ances- 
tors are, or were, quite unknown, men of historic name or of 
no name whatever, sons whose fathers are so rich that how 
to spend their wealth is a real anxiety, and sons of parents so 
poor that how they live is a wonder to all men who knoAv — ■ 
may meet together, dine together, sit at the same table, 
eat of the same food, without violating any religious law 
or principle. This unity of class, of race, of mind, comes 
from a unity of manhood and of religion, which recognizes 
the man; and is one of the many results of Paul's action 
at Antioch. In India men may be educated together, 
yet together they cannot live, for education cannot 
unite where religion holds asunder; and where men have 
no common table they can have neither common manhood 
nor common life. 

4. As described in the second chapter of the Epistle to the 
Galatians, Peter, in eating with the Gentiles, simply denied 
the law of caste, which, as an integral part of religion, came 
from its being based on distinctions of speech, of colour, 
and of race. Hence the act was construed as equal to a 
denial of any preeminence, not only of Jewish blood, but 



APOSTOLIC DIFFERENCES AT ANTIOCH 50I 

also of the efficacy and distinction of the circumcision which 
symbolized Jewish religion. The spirit of happy brother- 
hood which reigned at Antioch carried Peter off his feet; 
and, like the honest and impulsive man he was, **he did eat 
with the Gentiles." But certain hard, formal Jewish men 
came from James ; and they so terrified Peter that all the 
generous impulses died within him, and "he drew back and 
separated" from the Gentiles. The recoil ''carried away" 
**the rest of the Jews," and bore even Barnabas back to 
the old law. But Paul, who here remained immovable, 
stood up and rebuked Peter ' ' to the face because he was to 
be blamed." It is a hard thing to withstand a brother to his 
face, especially when he is as open and free-handed as was 
Peter. It is easy, indeed, to withstand any man behind his 
back; that, indeed, is not to withstand, but simply to 
supplant. It is not to correct a friend, but to create an 
enemy; it is not to uphold a right, but to inflict a wrong, 
making apologetic or explanatory speech impossible. Paul, 
by his method of public reproof, made it evident that not 
only had he a good cause, but a cause that was so good that 
it was capable of being argued before all men, and so just 
that it had nothing to fear from Peter's reply. And the 
question, -as he argued it, was lifted above all trivialities, 
whether they belonged to eating and drinking, or to circum- 
cision. For the Pauline law had more to do with a method 
of saving than with any question of race ; whether one is Jew 
or Gentile is a less question than another involved, whether 
works be required or faith alone be needful to the man's 
saving. Here we have, therefore, the distinctive Pauline 
gospel : Man is not justified bylaw, but by faith ; he is saved 
by grace, and not by works. In salvation God is all in all ; 
His is the mercy that pities. His is the love that redeems, 
His is the will that justifies. In kin or name, in birth or 



502 CHRIST THE END OF CONTROVERSY 

blood, in civil custom or religious observance, there is no 
merit that can avail before God; nor is any needed, for 
man can now attain the righteousness of God which is by 
faith in Jesus Christ. And hence this faith ends the reign 
of the sinful flesh; it is **no longer I that live, but Christ 
that liveth in me."* With the Christian man, made an 
incarnation of Christ as Christ is of God Himself, must not 
the eternal love which gave itself up for me live in me for 
the saving of the world ? 

* Gal. ii. 20. 



VIII 
PAUL IN EUROPE 

I 

I. T)AUL returned from Jerusalem to Antioch with a 
^ clearer mind on many questions, and especially on 
three : (a) He had not been made an apostle by such persons 
as he had met. Peter, James, and John may have been men 
of reputation who were pillars in the church, yet they had 
neither created nor sanctioned nor sanctified his apostle- 
ship * (0) He was commanded by a God he dared not dis- 
obey ; and to be silent was to be disobedient-f (7) The men 
he was to preach the Gospel to he must seek out ; otherwise 
they would not hear what God had designed and destined 
for them. J He was free indeed to wander wherever there 
were men; but, according to his own custom, he could 
not go unaccompanied. So he proposed to his ancient 
comrade that they should again travel together, visit the 
churches where they had converts, and see how the 
brethren fared. § But Barnabas declined. What his rea- 
sons were for the declinature may be conjectured rather 
than certainly known ; and they may be represented now as 
those that either do or do not flatter human pride, and now 
as a mixture of the mean and the sublime. The reasons 
which flatter this pride are most in keeping with the tra- 
ditional character of Barnabas, and have as their most 
common root a sympathy which leans to the side of the 

* Gal. i. i; ii. 6-9. f 2 Cor. v. 11, 13-16, 18-20. 

J Rom. X. 6-9, 13-16. § Acts XV. 36. 

503 



504 BARNABAS AND PAUL. 

oppressed, who are as a rule weaker than their oppressor. 
Barnabas had friends on both sides ; and he could not bear 
to see persons he loved differ in opinion, or to feel himself 
bound to go with strength while he sympathized with weak- 
ness. This feeling was intensified by a sort of parental 
afifection he had for John Mark, *'a sister's son."* This 
relative he had in the previous journey taken as a com- 
panion ;t but the lad's heart had failed, and with it his 
will to serve. Paul, who admired strength, especially as 
seen in obedience, distrusted the fickle youth and would 
not have him ; but Barnabas would not go without him.J 
So between the two there arose ''so sharp a contention 
that they departed asunder, the one from the other. "§ 

The reasons which do not flatter human pride are yet 
counterfeits of those that do, exhibiting a mixture of the 
mean and the sublime ; their common root is in what may 
be termed ' 'sympathy with the weak" ; but it is this sym- 
pathy turned, as it were, sour through suspicion. Yet it is 
impossible to hold this position without adding that Bar- 
nabas' motives were more mixed than is quite compatible 
with his assumed simplicity of character ; and that the real 
reason why he broke the ties which had so long and so 
closely bound him to Paul was rather jealous envy of 
strength than sympathy with weakness. This assumes 
that we can correctly name envy the curious amalgam of the 
jealousy which refuses to be patronized by a man we once 
were patrons of, and of the feeling of pity for the weak 
which feels sore with the strong, [j 

2. The conflict appealed to Paul as a question of belief, 

* Col. iv. 10. t Acts XV. 37, 

J Acts XV. 38. § Acts XV. 39. 

II Paul may be said to have equal responsibility with Barnabas for Mark's 
presence in Antioch (xii. 25). He may have been a native of Jerusalem 
(xii. 12), and so known to the church there. 



DIFFERENCES YET AGREEMENTS 505 

in which be became ever keener in temper and more un- 
compromising in judgment; but to Barnabas it seemed a 
difference between persons which estranged those who ought 
to be friends. The parting of Paul and Barnabas was all 
the more tragic that it was so inevitable. Paul could under- 
stand Barnabas better than Barnabas could understand 
Paul. Barnabas made the greater sacrifice, though possi- 
bly it cost him less to do it ; but Paul performed the greater 
duty and suffered the acuter pain. There are men who so 
pity the weak as to fear to offend him, and they would 
govern the world according to his whim ; such a man was 
Barnabas. But there are other men who think truth in its 
struggle with error in need of a man's strength, and the 
coward to them is simply a man who may leave a gap or 
create a tremor in the ranks through which the enemy may 
steal — Paul was one who so thought. The faint-hearted 
are too careless of freedom and truth to be entrusted with 
the work of Providence in the world; while the strong 
think too lightly of the weak to be left in supreme control. 
If we have ever for truth's sake surrendered the man we 
so loved as to wish to clasp him to our side with hoops of 
steel, we may be able to measure their sorrow. There is a 
place and a function in the church for both Barnabas and 
Paul ; Paul may best be fitted to be a minister of the truth 
which saves the soul ; but Barnabas was so built as to love 
the soul which the truth saves. It is, indeed, significant 
that when the fair and beautiful companionship which had 
done so much for man was sundered and broken, Bar- 
nabas disappears from history, and Paul steps upon a firmer 
and broader stage. Barnabas and John Mark sailed away 
to Cyprus,* and while ''the son of exhortation "f may there 

* Acts XV. 39. 

t Acts iv. 36. The name is related to the irpo^-nTrjs, part of whose duty 
was to "exhort" (xv. 32; i Cor. xiv. 3). 



5o6 PAUL ENTERS UPON A VASTER STAGE 

have continued trying to heal the broken in heart and to 
strengthen the feeble in will, yet he is seen no more. But 
Paul stands out more clearly as a doer of the deeds which 
carried in their bosom the happiness as well as the future 
of mankind. 

3. What now marked Paul's entrance upon this new and 
vaster stage may be said to be his assertion of a right which 
no man could dispute of the apostleship to the Gentiles.* 
In him Christianity as a religion became conscious of its 
universal functions and destiny. And how shall we better 
describe the process which turned a natural human person 
into an organ and agent of the Divine Will than as a direct 
call of the Almighty ? f This has been in its universal 
aspects disguised in a question which men may still think 
it worth their trouble to discuss: What is the supreme 
moment in history ? Was the greatest hour when Moses 
fled from the Egyptians to the desert ; or when the Romans 
gathered on the hills above the Tiber and began to build 
their huts of mud and clay ; or when Alexander of Macedon 
broke out of Greece and carried the Greek tongue over the 
world ; or when Caesar crossed the Rubicon to change, by 
help of his legions, an outworn republic into a potent em- 
pire ? Each of these may have its advocates ; but to me 
the supreme event is when '* Paul chose Silas," and started 
with him on a mission that before it was ended had con- 
verted Europe and inaugurated the reign of one religion 
for civilized man. The idea and its realization were Paul's, 
who did not, indeed, found Christianity, though he made 
it universal. 

4. Once men wrote, as there may be men who still write, 
the history of Paul's enterprise somewhat thus: *'An ugly 
little Jew, an ill-clad artisan, who earned a mean living 

* Gal. ii. 9. t Gal. i. 16. 



ESTIMATED BY AN IMAGINED HISTORIAN 507 

at weaving cloth for tents, — a Jew of the class more 
familiar with the slums and gutters of the East End than 
with the spacious squares and gilded palaces of our West 
Ends — and I so speak not because by personal experience 
or inspection I know anything of the East End, but because 
the men belong to a class which is accustomed to seek a 
bed on the quay and to frequent places where outcasts 
most do congregate — began about this time to preach what 
he was pleased to call his gospel. He gathered in the 
cities he visited a curious concourse of people — slaves, 
often runaways, who had deserted and wanted to forget 
the masters they once had — porters, wharfingers, tailors, 
cobblers, freedmen of all sorts, devout women, and 
women who had once been undevout — and he consti- 
tuted them into societies, or guilds, which he had the 
audacity to name ifCKXijaiai, just as if they had been 
regular assemblies of free-born or enfranchised men. A 
considerable measure of success attended his enterprise, for 
fanaticism and hypocrisy are near akin; and the fanatic 
never fails to find people willing to be deceived as he is 
prompt at deceiving. It is worthy of note that this man 
was a Hellenistic Jew, which means that he was even 
hungrier than the hungriest Greek." 



II 

I . But we, looking back through the centuries, with eyes 
they have clarified and illumined, find the real man to be 
quite other than our supposititious historian had imagined. 
We find him to have achieved the greatest work any man 
ever accomplished. For he is a possessed man, impelled 
by an idea to visit many lands and cities, preaching wher- 



5o8 SILAS AMONG THE PROPHETS. 

ever he goes to all classes and races. He chooses Silas as 
his companion, no untried or unworthy successor of Bar- 
nabas, but a man who had proved his fitness to accompany 
a missionary to mankind. By descent Silas may have been 
like Paul himself a Hellenist, and therefore a Jew ; or like 
Nicolas of Antioch,* a proselyte, and therefore a Gentile. 
Of his descent absolutely nothing is known ; and he is first 
met "as a chief man among the brethren" at Jerusalem.f 
As such he is sent with Judas, as a man trusted by ''the 
apostles and the elders and the whole church," to accom- 
pany Paul and Barnabas ; and as a chosen man he goes to ■ 
tell Antioch ''by word of mouth" the same things as were 
contained in the apostolic letter. J He knew the men at 
Jerusalem and its older traditions, but his sympathies with 
them were imperfect ; he so believed with the freer spirits 
at Antioch that he, though a prophet, specially called to 
"exhort the brethren," abode ^there and did not return 
with Judas to the mother church. § We can imagine some- 
thing of the attraction of Silas for Paul, and of Paul for 
Silas ; their biographies had been similar — both had been 
disillusioned; both, though they had lost faith in the 
apostles, had gained faith in Christianity as a universal 
religion needed of men, and so as an absolutely new thing 
in the world. 

2. And so Paul, with Silas as his companion, leaves Anti- 
och, journeys through Syria and Cilicia, where we may be 
sure he would not forget its capital, Tarsus. Together they 
visit Derbe and Lystra, make new converts without forget- 
ting the old. They traverse the Phrygian and Galatic re- 
gion, and thought of preaching in the province of Asia, where 
large cities like Ephesus and Smyrna and Pergamos stood 

* Acts vi. 5. t Acts XV. 22. 

J Acts XV. 27. § Acts XV. 34. 



PAUL TRAVELS THROUGH ASIA MINOR 509 

in their way and attracted them ; but the Holy Spirit for- 
bade. Then they looked northward to Bithynia, where 
were brawny and strenuous men, a race it would be well to 
evangelize ; but thither the Spirit suffered them not to go. 
By Mysia they passed, and ''came down to Troas"; and 
there, as Paul faced the sea and looked over into Europe, the 
things he may have learned and dreamed of at Tarsus and 
in Asia shaped themselves into a vision. For the point 
where he stood and the places he had passed through could 
not have been insignificant to him. Before he had reached 
Troas he may have caught sight of the Scamander, "yellow 
as a duck's foot"; while the very name of the place be- 
came prophetic of the future. Priam and his son Hector 
would be there, doing battle with the well-greaved Greeks 
who had come in their swift ships across the sea to avenge 
a ravished home; to demolish the stronghold which shel- 
tered the loves and the infamies of Paris and Helen; and 
to accomplish deeds whose fame could be translated into 
a song that, like the music of Homer's own ''loud-sounding 
sea," lives and echoes for ever. There, too, in later days^ 
Alexander of Macedon had come, romantic and a creator 
of romance, yet wayward, with a sort of epic ambition seek- 
ing worlds to conquer, and finding what he sought. There, 
too, as the Latin poet has imagined and sung, the Romans 
were ere Rome was; and thence had they in the loins of 
Father ^neas started westward to found in a fairer land 
and under a happier sky the mightiest empire of time. 

3. While the place around him thus spoke to his 
imagination, the realms behind and the cities through 
which he had passed had not been dumb. There, from 
time immemorial, East and West had met and mingled 
in the most diverse peoples and races and religions. 
The armies of Egypt had marched over the land, led by 



5IO PAUL AT TROAS LOOKS INTO EUROPE 

kings who worshipped the cat or the cow, the serpent or 
the beetle. The sons of the mighty hunter, Nimrod, had 
there conquered and governed. Along the coasts Phoeni- 
cian barks had traded, carrying the purple and the vices, the 
wares and the gods of Tyre. Moses and the Hebrews had 
there witnessed to God and His law, and the prophets 
had preached to men who did not care to hear. Persia had 
there taught a dualism, faith in a good and an evil deity, 
a seed of thought whose riper fruit a certain Augustine, like 
a later and more western Paul, was to pluck and taste and 
cast away. Hither, too, from the remoter East the Bud- 
dhist monk may have come, preaching the misery of life, the 
good of perfect oblivion, and the piety of asceticism. And 
would not a region so rich in dead gods and in decayed reli- 
gions speak somewhat thus to Paul: "What wilt thou do 
with thy new faith ? Listen to the voice of the ancient sea : 
'So far mayst thou come, but no farther canst thou go; 
tarry here, let the faith thou bearest live and die on the 
soil which has been the birthplace and graveyard of so 
many beliefs.' " 

4. But a man whose soul was, as it were, pregnant 
with the future could not obey the hollow voice of the 
dead; and so his spirit turned from the wrinkled age 
of Asia to the fair face of Europe, where dwelt power and 
perennial youth. He saw that a faith to be universal 
must win the mind of the world; that a religion which 
did not capture and control the reason could have neither 
divinity nor majesty for man. And that Reason which 
still lived and flourished in Greece, and especially in Athens, 
where was taught a nobler philosophy than had satis- 
fied Tarsus, and which demanded that men should teach 
it, asks: "What is truth? Who will show us the living 
good, or bring to our knowledge a better deity than our 



AND HAS A VISION 5 II 

fathers or our schools have known ? " But he also saw and 
knew that religion could not prosper apart from commerce ; 
that it must go with the tradesman to his shop ; with the 
merchant to the exchange ; with the sailor in his ship, and 
must be carried over the whole earth amid the wares 
man purchases. And if religion was to be allied with com- 
merce, must it not seek a home in cities like Corinth or 
Alexandria, whence it might be wafted by the winds across 
the Mediterranean Sea to Italy and even Rome ? And the 
artisans who made the goods which the merchant exchanged ; 
as well as the slaves who toiled to produce wealth for their 
masters, and the masters the slaves maintained in idleness, 
did they not need religion to ennoble their manhood and 
enhance their view of life ? And where could men be met in 
greater numbers than in imperial Rome and in the maritime 
cities of the empire ? And Rome herself, which had given 
man order and law, civil rights and intellectual freedom, 
whose legionaries and jurists, whose philosophers and poets, 
orators and men of letters, soldiers and civilians, generals 
and proconsuls, were everywhere, and wherever they were 
were empowered either to conquer or to govern; and was 
not the emperor worshipped as a god, and the city which 
had given her name to the empire — did not she most of all 
need the new religion with its gracious humanity, its be- 
neficent yet sovereign Deity ? And if this religion did not 
conquer the city which governed the world, how could it 
ever expect to convert and to hold the world which the 
city governed? And did not to the west and north 
of Italy tribes live, whether called Gauls, Britons, 
Germans, Helvetic or Spanish men, — who were all to be 
states and kingdoms when Rome had ceased to be an 
empire ? And how could they, unhelped and unblessed by 
a humane religion, develop all their infinite promise ? The 



512 THE MAN OF MACEDONIA AND HIS CRY. 

future of Europe lay, therefore, not in the hands of Augustus 
— who was to find it more easy to rebuild Rome in imperial 
marble rather than in republican brick, or create within her 
the ideals of Roman law — but in the soul of Paul as he 
looked from Troas across the silver strip of sea. 



Ill 

I . Whether the man of Macedonia were or were not the 
same person as the author of the Acts, is a question more 
curious than either edifying or scientific; but it is other- 
wise with the vision, especially when read through the 
saying which is its interpretation: "Come over into Mace- 
donia and help us."* In this saying three things are 
emphasized: (a) the person who has the vision: he who 
hears the cry for help, and in obedience to it crosses to 
Europe; (/3) the thing he was to bring, the new religion, 
which was to come to their help; (7) the persons who 
needed the new religion. It is evident that of these ele- 
ments the man who had the vision is the most important. 
Paul believed in the universal function of Christianity ; and 
he effectively preached what he himself had discovered. 
The monotheism of Israel, which was the apostle's birthright 
and the birthright of every Jew, was the basis of what was 
universal in Christianity; but this monotheism was trebly 
modified (i) by the attribution of Fatherhood to God ; f (ii) 
by the title, construed in an essential sense, given to the 
Founder of Christianity, ''the Son of God"; J and (iii) 
by the title He had given to Himself of ''the Son of Man." § 

* Acts xiv. 9. 

t Matt. xi. 25; Rom. viii. 15; Col. i. 19; Heb. xii. 7-9. 
X John i. 18, 49; iii. 16-18; v. 26; Rom. viii. 32. 
§ Matt. viii. 20; ix. 6; xi. 19; Luke v. 24. 



MAN GREATER THAN EITHER JEW OR GREEK 513 

The (i) followed directly from the (ii), and the (ii) by in- 
evitable inference from the (i), as the ultimate datum of 
our thinking is conceived as given either in Christian ex- 
perience or in human reason. The (iii) signifies what God 
is in relation to man. For that One who should speak 
of Himself as ''Son of Man" while men speak of Him as 
''Son of God," means the coalescence in Him of the ideas 
of God and man; that to be a "man" is to be nearer God 
and to have more of Him within than to be either Jew or 
Greek; that God had a scheme, which He had not for 
special families of men only, but for collective humanity, 
for he who is built into it alone reaches the Divine end of 
his being; that every man could be what Christ was, and 
each is bound to become what He was; that only those 
who realized the filial ideal became members of the social 
unity termed mankind; and that man is a Diviner name 
than either Jew or Greek, Gentile or Roman, for these 
names are but special, while "man" is generic, and denotes 
not only a race, but also a Divine society. 

2 . The ' ' vision ' ' expressed therefore more than the brood- 
ing habit of the Pauline mind ; it expressed the idea that 
the thoughts which took shape in the Macedonian and his 
cry were born of sympathy with the purposes of God 
and the capabihties of man. The "vision" was, indeed, 
heavenly, and signified three things: (a) a call which 
God gave, (jS) an obedience which Paul supplied, and 
(7) sufferings which were furnished by the action of 
man. And sufferings seemed the only things which the 
vision invited to; Paul by stepping into Europe stepped 
into pain. Not that suffering was a new thing to 
him; he had suffered much from Jew and Gentile and 
Christian. He forsook the Jews' religion, but he did not 
cease to love the Jews. Love is a rare as well as an excellent 



514 THE CRY OF THE MACEDONIAN BEGOT IN 

thing, in which the higher self achieves a victory over the 
lower. Paul became more Christlike as he conceived 
Christ to be the Son of God, Divine and yet, as ideal man, 
human, who loved him, lived in him, and through him loved 
all mankind * He did not cease to be a convert and never 
either felt or acted as an apostate. An apostate is a man 
who changes sides without changing convictions ; he does 
the one without doing the other, probably because he has no 
convictions to change. But a convert is a man who changes 
sides because he has changed convictions, and has found the 
change of convictions even harder than the change of sides. 
The apostate makes up for his contempt of the men he has 
joined by his hatred of the men he has forsaken; but the 
convert expresses his devotion to his new beliefs by his 
respect for the old. An apostate loves no one, not even 
himself, especially if love be a form of self-respect ; a con- 
vert hates no one, least of all a brother man. An apostate 
is the man whose God is himself; a convert is the man so 
in the hands of God that, being what God means him to 
be, he is always humble and obedient. 

3. This distinction is illuminative as well as illustrative. 
Paul never ceased to love the Jews ; the Jews never came 
either to know or to love Paul. They could not feel as 
Browning felt to his lost leader: 

Just for a handful of silver he left us, 
Just for a ribbon to stick in his coat, 

for he gained by his change neither silver, nor ribbon, nor 
even a coat. He chose a religion which was, historically, 
the successor of Judaism ; but in choosing it he also chose 
poverty, want, oppression, pain, and the hatred of the men 
he had left. "If he had only remained ours," they may 

* Gal. ii. 20-21. 



PAUL A VISION WHICH WAS A DIVINE CALL 515 

have said, ''we might have thrown off the Roman yoke, 
have cast away the oppressor, built up another than the 
rabbinical religion and reformed our faith from within. ' ' As 
he had gone without their leave, they followed him with 
their hate. There is no hate so vigilant, so vindictive and 
vengeful, so pitiless, unsparing, and ubiquitous as religious 
hate. Paul may have crossed to Europe in the expectation 
of escaping from it, but he was soon disillusioned. While he 
would have preferred to be anathema from Christ rather 
than repay fraternal hate with hate, he contented himself as 
respects the Jews with a devout prayer for their well-being.* 
In the old blood feuds there is something ennobling. A 
vendetta, where a man inherits an insult to his father 
and lives simply to avenge the insult, and when he fails 
through death he hands it on to his brother or to his 
cousin, has in it — in its very challenge of fatality to 
himself — an element of dignity and of manhood. But 
the religious spite which treats the opponent as a social 
outcast, which denies him dignity, truth, grace, steals 
from him his manhood, and even — what he prizes most 
of all — his citizenship of the kingdom of God, this un- 
dying, vindictive, infuriate, senile, religious spite is the 
meanest thing our nature ever knows. By noble and 
effacing brotherly love it ought to be dealt with. If a 
man despises us, and we refuse to allow him the awful 
privilege of provoking us, either to utter despite or to 
indulge dislike, we may do a manly thing. To be filial to 
God is to love all who bear His name. We must so live 
that in our souls the shadow of anything so mean, so im- 
potent, so un-Christlike as human scorn never finds a 
place. 

* Rom. ix. 3-x. I. 



5l6 THE AUTHOR OF THE ACTS A GREEK YET A ROMAN 

IV 

I. The author of the Acts, manifestly a Greek by birth 
and nature,* though reconciled to the Roman Empire,t and 
by conversion a Christian,} had in him hatred and suspi- 
cion of the Jew too deeply ingrained to be eradicated by any 
superficial change. He watches himself most carefully, 
lest he unduly indulge his hate of the Jew ; and his watchful- 
ness makes him more than just, even generous to him. § He 
may have expected Paul to have a less troubled course in Eu- 
rope than he had in Asia, where our author did not know the 
people. This conclusion is quite independent of any theory 

* That the author is one with the writer of the third S3moptic Gospel 
goes without saying. This follows not only from the style and the vocabu- 
lary, but also from deocpiXos, a name which occurs only in the N.T. in 
the Preface to both books (Luke i. 3 ; Acts i. i ), as well as from the 
phrasing of the Preface to the Acts, which speaks of a irpwros \6yos, and 
implies that Acts is a devrepos. From this it follows that the Preface to 
Luke i. 1-4 is intended to apply to both books ; and the same influences 
which presided over the composition of the one book presided over the 
writing of the other. This becomes evident when it is seen that in both 
works religion is so exhibited as to be independent of its official repre- 
sentatives, whoever or whatever they may be. 

f This is to be seen not only in the adventure in the prison at Philippi 
(Acts xvi. 32-8), and at Jerusalem (Acts xxii. 26-8 ; xxiii. 27), but also 
in the attitude to the Roman power. Hence Peter converts Cornelius 
(x. 1-48), Paul the deputy (xiii. 7-12). Nor is Paul to the Romans, as he 
is to the Jews, a political person and agitator (xviii. 14, it;; xix. 37; 
xxiii. 29). 

I The general design of the work is to show the superiority of the Greek 
to the Jew as a Christian, and so to justify him and his view of Christianity ; 
but our author did not think of the changes which were induced in the 
religion b}'' the new minds into which it entered. He was not the last 
of his race to embrace it, or he would have recognized that mere change 
was not in itself good. 

§ This is the obvious explanation of what is called, euphemistically, 
by Schmiedel in Encyclop. Bihlica, "inaccuracies of tendency," the 
"tendency" being first conceived, then explained, then ascribed to our 
author, and finally his "inaccuracies" are deduced from his "tendency" ; 
while his attitude "towards non-Christian Jews" is said to be "harsh" 
(cf. ii. 23; vii. 51-53 ; xviii. 5, 6, 12-17; xix. 13-16), and our idea of Paul 
to be " completely changed " from what it is in his epistles. He ap- 



AND BY NATURE OPPOSED TO THE HEBREWS 517 

touching the "we-source" or ''fragment."* The diarist 
may have been either a nameless "man of Macedonia," or 
one named, though elsewhere, and known; he may have 
been either Timothy or Titus, either Silas or Luke; but 
whoever he was, he simply meant to tell the truth and 
record what he saw. This is all we assume, and there can- 
not be a smaller assumption. The author of the Acts and 
the diarist are alike in saying the best possible for their 
people; and as they are Paul is represented to be.f He is 

preaches the proselytes through the synagogue, and does not " betake 
himself" to the Gentiles till he has been rejected by "the Jews" (cf, 
xiii. 14, 45, 46 ; xviii. 4-6 ; xix. 8, 9). The " inaccuracies " and the 
"tendency" are purely subjective, matters of conjecture and hallucina- 
tion in a superfine eye. 

* These "fragments," which have as their special note the use of the 
first person plural, occur as follows : Acts xvi. 10-17 ; xx. 5-15 ; xxi. 
1-18; xxvii. i-xxviii. 16. Hence, they are all associated with the 
missionary or other journeys of Paul by sea, whether from Troas to 
Philippi (xvi. 10-17); from Macedonia to Miletus (xx. 5-15); thence by 
Coos and Tyre, Ptolemais and Caesarea, to Jerusalem (xxi. 1-18) ; and 
from Ca:sarea to Rome (xxvii. i-xxxiii. 16). It is called sometimes "the 
travel document," or "the journey record" [Encyclop. Biblica). There 
' is also seen in its predominant connection with Macedonia two indica- 
tions, (a) of the writer's home, and (j8) of his identity with "the man of 
Macedonia." 

f The "tendency" amongst higher critics is, in the reaction against 
Baur and the criticism of Tiibingen, to substitute the Paul of the "we 
fragments" in Acts for the Paul of the Epistles, on the ground that Baur 
spared too much to allow us to conceive Paul as a natural and normal 
person. Yet in the "travel document" such obviously supernatural 
events occur as the casting out of an "evil spirit" from a pos- 
sessed damsel (xvi. 16-18), the waking of Eutychus from the sleep of 
death (xx. 9-12), those connected with Philip's daughters, the Pro- 
phetesses, and Agabus, the Prophet (xxi. 9-13), and Paul's own inspired 
feeling or replies; while in his last journey either on shipboard or on 
dry land many miracles are narrated, including some acts of healing, 
an appearance of an angel, a miraculous preservation from a snake- 
bite. These are surely enough to please anyone hungering for the 
supernatural. One is safer with Baur, if one wants a strictly natural 
and normal interpretation of Paul, than with any recent representative 
of modern historico-literary criticism. This is said in view of the fact 
th^t Baur more suspects the author of the Acts of a nefarious design in 



5l8 THE JEWS A MINORITY IN GRECO-ROMAN CITIES. 

a Jew, born in "the dispersion," arrested by his conversion 
on the way to become a rabbi ; and he is too honest to seem 
other than he is. And as the best thing either can say is 
said for his people, and ''the Gentiles," who inhabit the 
cities of Asia, and who were not either the kinsmen of 
the Greeks or, indeed, Europeans at all, are made out to 
be so wicked and weak as to be pliable in the hands of **the 
Jews," the implicate is that it would be otherwise in Greek 
or Roman cities. There the Jews were not only in a minor- 
ity, but also were too thoroughly despised; and there 
was too little sympathy with their religion to enable them 
to become influential. 

2. Hence our Greek author is suspicious, even retro- 
spectively, of the Asian men. Antioch in Syria, the city 
whence Paul, with Barnabas, started on their missionary 
journey,* and where they returned and reported the re- 
sult of their labours,! is the only town where the Jews 
are numerous, yet powerless. At Salamis, in Cyprus, Paul 
preached **in the synagogue of the Jews" ; and at Paphos, 
in the same isle, he met at the deputy's **a certain sorcerer, 
a false prophet, a Jew, whose name was Bar- Jesus. "J Of 
Perga, in Pamphylia, where John Mark had left them,§ we 
know more from other sources than the Acts. In the Pisi- 
dian Antioch, Paul and Barnabas go to "the synagogue," || 
where is delivered a speech which gives special offence to 
Baur, ^ yet in the circumstances it is as natural as anything 

using the " we-source," where " he presents himself as an eye-witness 
and fellow-traveller" (" Paul," E.T., vol. i, p. 13). Now, why should any 
" nefarious design " in his use of the " we-fragments " be attributed to 
our author ? 

* Acts xiii. 1-3. f Acts xiv. 26-28. J Acts xiii. 5-12. 

§ Acts xiii. 13-xv. s^, 3Q. || Acts xiii. 14. 

^ E.T., i, pp. 101-104. Baur's cardinal position is : "the fresher 'Paul' 
came to the work, the more clearly he ought to display the Pauline 
spirit." And he adds how little the address "bears a Pauline character." 



HOW THEIR INHABITANTS ACTED TO THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 519 

in the Epistle to the Galatians. The address deHvered, the 
Jews trooped * * out of the synagogue ' ' ; but the ' ' Gentiles ' ' 
remained behind, rejoicing in the unwonted note of hope 
in the word of promise, and ** besought that these words 
might be preached to them the next Sabbath."* And 
Antioch did not forget, and ''almost the whole city came 
together to hear the word of God."t But **the Jews, filled 
with envy," contradicted Paul and blasphemed, ''stirred 
up the devout and honourable women, and the chief men 
of the city, and raised persecution against Paul and Bar- 
nabas," and expelled them. J They consequently "came 
unto Iconium," where the old story was repeated, and "the 
unbelieving Jews stirred up the Gentiles, and made their 
minds evil affected against the brethren." Their attitude 
waked the old spirit in Paul and Barnabas, who abode a 
long time in Iconium; "but the multitude of the city was 
divided; and part held with the Jews, and part with the 
apostles." § 

V 
I. Paul and Barnabas, therefore, at the delivery of an 
assault fled from Iconium to Lystra,|| where a curious yet 

Yet no man had a clearer idea than Baur, when " apology " did not get 
in his way, of what " development " signified. He compares, in support 
of the thesis that Peter and Stephen and Paul have but one address 
among them, the speech given in Pisidian Antioch, as reported in Acts xiii., 
with those attributed to Peter and to Stephen, As regards Stephen's, 
he compares vii. 17 with xiii. 17 ; and as regards Peter, he compares 
xiii. 23-30 with x. 37-41 and iii. 13-17. Special attention is invited 
to iii. 17 and xiii. 27, as well as iii. 15 and xiii. 30. He emphasizes the 
fact that " the same argument is drawn from the same passage of the 
Psalms " (xvi. 10), but does not explain why the principal passages cited 
from the O.T. by Paul are not found in Peter's speech (Ps. ii. 7 ; Isa. Iv. 3). 
He confesses, too, that the conclusion (xiii. 38, 39) is Pauline, without any 
parallel in the earlier speeches ; and fails to explain — the omission is here 
fatal, especially when the man himself and his audience are taken into 
account — why it would have miscarried and been esteeined discourteous. 

* Acts xiii. 42. f Acts xiii. 44. 

:J: Acts xiii. 45-50. § Acts xiv. 1-4. || Acts xiv. 11,12. 



520 BARNABAS AND PAUL CONCEIVED AS GODS. 

characteristic incident happened. Lystra took Barnabas 
and Paul for gods. That is an elegant as well as eloquent 
touch where Barnabas, the silent man, is taken for the 
greater god, and where Paul, the man who speaks, is taken 
for the minor deity.* The ideal of these Gentiles was to be 
idle; and so supposing the supreme to be a silent god, they 
held the insignificant man to be the more Divine. Hence 
they brought oxen — garlanded, perfumed, made ready for 
sacrifice — to offer unto these descended deities. Think of 
the agony to Paul to have men coming to him as if he were 
himself the Messiah. f From that to stoning there was but 
a step; stupid adoration is but a form of still more stupid 
dislike. It is only what we expect when we read that, after 
their fit of enthusiastic adoration, Paul was stoned and left 
for dead. There was, indeed, little wonder that in these 
cities ** the souls of the disciples" needed to be strengthened, 
and to learn that "only through much tribulation could 
men enter the kingdom of God." J 

2 . But the old story was repeated in Lystra. * * Jews from 
Antioch and Iconium came thither and persuaded the 
people," § and Paul "departed with Barnabas to Derbe."|| 
That city is the farthest point which they reached and 
where they preached. Thence "they returned to Lystra, 
to Iconium, and to Antioch, "^f and "after they had passed 
throughout Pisidia they came to Pamphylia," ** where 
John and Mark left them .ft And ' ' when they had preached 
the word in Perga," from a point on the coast they also 
sailed to another point opposite Cyprus, Seleucia, whence 
they had started, and thence they reached the Syrian 
Antioch. f J When Paul restarted, accompanied by Silas, 

* Acts xiv. II, 12. t Acts xiv. 14-17. J Acts xiv. 22. 

§ Acts xiv. 19. II Acts xiv. 20. ^ Acts xiv. 21. 

** Acts xiv. 24, 25. ft Acts xiii. 13 to xv. 38. J J Acts xiii. 4; xiv, 26. 



GALATIAN CITIES MAIN SCENE OF HIS LABOURS 52 1 

the ancient tale was again repeated. He may have 
gone ''through Syria and Cihcia,"* but Iconium, Derbe 
and Lystra were the main scenes of his labours-t Paul 

* Gal. i. 21 ; Acts xv. 41. 

f xvi. I. The question as to whether these were the cities ad- 
dressed in the Epistle to the Galatians, or where they were, whether in 
the South or in the North, of the Roman province of Galatia, is 
primarily one of interpretation. The Epistle to Galatians raises many 
geographical questions, especially since Sir William Ramsay raised 
the matter of Southern v. Northern Galatia. In what we call Asia 
Minor two things were notable: (i.) territorial, (ii.) ethnological changes. 
The territorial may be said to be due to the ethnological ; but only 
in part. They were due more to a change of masters than of men, 
or a movement of the peoples ; and the Roman Empire was the most 
masterful, as it was the last of the great world-powers. The ethnology 
was thus quite as mixed as the provinces or the territories. There were 
quite a number of tribes, and the Gaul may have been one of them ; 
if we are to believe our classical authorities, whose testimony, how- 
ever, seldom amounts to more than the expression of an opinion, Strabo 
and Polybius, Justin and Jerome, and even such critical moderns as 
Holm (vol. iv, 96) and Sir W. M. Ramsay. But there is no need to discuss 
the question further. It is otherwise, however, with the question as to 
the silence of the author of the Acts concerning (i.) the founding of the 
Churches of Galatia, and (ii.) the movement which we know as the move- 
ment of the Judaisers. The epistle which is designed to counteract their 
teaching may be 'said to be chiefly concerned with the apostleship of 
Paul, which covers indeed his authority, views, mission, status, character. 
In its broadest sense this may be said to be the theme of the entire 
epistle ; but in its narrower it only embraces chapters i. and ii. Chapters 
iii. and iv. to verse 7 have to do with doctrine. From iv. 8, v. to end 
of chapter, is occupied with personal statements, a section which deals 
with the interpretation of the Old Testament, and discussions on liberty, 
which involves the new law of love. Chapter vi. to the end the epistle is 
largely taken up with duty, and may be said to have its keynote in 
vi. 10, which runs thus : "As we have therefore opportunity, let us 
do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of 
faith." 

Galatians is an epistle addressed to many churches situated in several 
cities. I have said that chapters i. and ii. are mainly occupied with Paul's 
apostleship, which is seen to concern many, nay, all Gentiles, though only 
Barnabas and Titus are alluded to in their representative characters; and all 
Jews as Peter, James, and John. Paul declines to be made an apostle either 
through men or by man, but claims to be what he is by Jesus Christ and 
God the Father. He is a delegate of the brethren, which here means " the 



522 WHERE HOME OF TIMOTHEUS ; GALATIAN" 

and Silas were there at Lystra; they were joined by 
Timothy, who — always a favourite with Paul — was **the 

Churches of Galatia." May I call attention to the peculiarity of the 
phrase? He does not speak to them as "saints" (Rom. i. 7; 2 Cor. 
i. I ; Phil. i. i ; Col. i. i ; Eph. i. i), nor does he address them as citizens 
of one city as if they were met as members in one " church" (i Cor. i. 2 ; 
I Thess. i. I ; 2 Thess. i. i), but as so many "churches" which were 
scattered in several cities. The superscription and name of author 
runs from chapter i. 1-5. The paragraph that expresses his wonder that 
men who were at first enthusiastic supporters of him and his Gospel 
" should so soon have fallen away into another Gospel which is not 
another Gospel," belongs to the introduction. It is as if Paul had 
suddenly pulled himself up and said, " I cannot name anything as good 
news which is neither new nor good, and therefore there is no gospel 
save one which, like God Himself, admits of no second." Those "troub- 
lers" are quickly and easily sketched, as they are in the paragraph 
which extends i. 6-10. A second paragraph, which opens the main 
subject of the epistle, and shows his Gospel as not "after man," runs 
from 11-24. Like his apostleship this Gospel is neither through men 
nor by man, but of God the Father and Jesus Christ, His Son. The 
same paragraph contains references to (i) his pre-eminence in the Jews' 
religion, and (2) his profit in that religion which is, as it were, equal tO' 
the traditions of the fathers. The rest of the chapter may be thus 
summarized: (i.) The good pleasure of God in him, who separates 
him to his work from his mother's womb and calls him by His 
grace, (ii.) The revelation of the Son in him first on the way to 
Damascus, later in His providence ; as well as in his maintained being 
(iii.) The purpose for which the Son was revealed : — that he should 
" preach Him among the heathen." There is also (iv.) the failure tO' 
go up to Jerusalem to be delegated to this work by the apostles, his- 
going instead into Arabia, and his returning into Damascus, (v.) After 
three years he goes up to Jerusalem to see Peter ; and he distinguishes 
James " the Lord's brother," who holds an eminent position in the 
local church, from the other James, " the brother of John " and an 
apostle, (vi.) He goes into Syria and Cilicia. Cf. Acts xv. 41. (vii.) He 
declares himself unknown by face unto the Churches of Judaea, but: 
while he is unknown by face he is well known by reputation. It ad- 
mirably sums up the record in Acts. 

Chapter ii. has two great scenes, at Jerusalem and at Antioch, and 
these are noticed in succession. The Jerusalem scene described in verses 
I to 10 happened fourteen years later, Paul's companions being Barnabas 
and Titus: (i.) He goes up by " revelation," and not as the delegate of 
any church as at Antioch. This is not, therefore, the journey narrated in. 
Acts XV. (ii.) He goes to communicate "the Gospel" which he preached 
among the Gentiles, (iii.) Titus is taken as a Greek, and, as is here stated^ 



523 

son of a certain woman which was a Jewess and believed,'* 
and whose father was a Greek. Ti mothy was ' ' well reported 

was not compelled to be circumcised. But (iv.) "false brethren, surrepti- 
tiously introduced, who came in privily to spy out our liberty in Christ 
Jesus," make all attempts at privacy unavailing, and Paul does not for 
a single moment give place to them. He has nothing to conceal, and 
everything to gain by publicity, (v.) In public conference those who 
" seemed to be somewhat " do not add anything of any consequence to 
Paul's Gospel." (vi. ) The men with Peter, James, and John, encourage 
Paul to preach to the Gentiles, (vii. ) The only qualification they add is 
one Paul says he is jealous for, the remembrance of the poor. 

The scene at Antioch has been described, supra (pp. 499 fE.), and I 
have only to add two qualifying positions : (i. ) We cannot tell where 
Paul's discourse to Peter at Antioch ends, (ii.) In any case verses 20-21 
are excluded. The end is shrouded, and more agrees with John's, or 
the Fourth Gospel's, method than with Paul's. 

Chapter iii. to iv. 7 is concerned with doctrine, and may be said to have 
as its thesis, the truth and divinity of a gospel free from the Law, though 
not without " purple patches " and hints of personal qualities, as when he 
speaks to the Galatians : "Oh, foolish Galatians," and adds, "who hath 
bewitched you ? " Yet these are rare. The principle of the whole may be 
said to concern ". Jesus Christ as set forth before your eyes crucified among 
you." There is (i.) an appeal to experience : " Received ye the Spirit by 
the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith ? " (ii.) There is the great 
example or influence of their folly ; having begun in the Spirit they seek to 
be perfected in the flesh, (iii. ) In verses ^-6 there are arguments touching 
the children as well as Abraham their father, (iv. ) In 7 and 8 there are further 
references to Abraham, (v, ) In 10 certain persons are said to be " under the 
curse of the law," and a noticeable point is that these references were 
intelligible mainly to the Jew and not at all to the Greek, which means that 
" the Churches of Galatia " had been replenished from the Synagogue 
and were of the same material as other Christian Churches, as stated in 
Acts. (vi. ) In II the argument is as to a man who is justified by 
faith in the sight of God. The law is said not to be of faith, but instead 
to be a great institution of works. The verses between 11 and 14 may be 
said to be an exposition of the question about the just living by faith, 
which means "just by faith" rather than "the just shall live." (vii.) 
From verses 15 to 18 the Gospel may be said to be not simply a fulfilment 
of the promise that " the just by faith shall live," but the covenant of 
promise is older than the covenant of law. " The covenant of promise " 
was given to Abraham; " the covenant of law," on the other hand, was 
given to Moses ; and in this paragraph (v. 16), occurs the famous saying as to 
the seeds and as to " thy seed which is Christ," whereon Origen commented. 
Paul did not know Greek when he said it. (viii.) In verse 19 there is raised 
an important question, the purpose of the law which is said to be "added 



524 Paul's ethics as christian apostle. 

of by the brethren," and Paul, ''because of the Jews,'' 
took and circumcised him * The decree of the council at 
Jerusalem was proclaimed and everywhere made welcome. f 

because of transgressions," and when that is said all is said that need be. 
(ix.) In iv, I he distinctly claims heirship as the right of all Christian 
men who therefore are said to be " heirs according to the promise," and 
" an heir so long as he is a child differeth nothing from a servant even 
though he be Lord of all." (x.) In this many have seen a hint of Paul's 
knowledge of Roman law. What follows, then, is a declaration of faith 
based not on history so much as on experience. The conclusion reached 
is stated in verse 7. 

In the section which follows, iv. 8-vi, 10, there is a definition of the 
ethics involved in Paul's apostleship and doctrine, while enough is said 
about the "foolish Galatians" to make the fame of any classical writer, 
or be the fortune of any one in search of racial features, (i.) The ques- 
tion in paragraph 8 to 1 1 is raised : " What then were ye when ye knew no 
God ? " It is emphatically true of the pagan Greek, as the previous argu- 
ment was true of the Jew, that " ye did service unto them which by nature 
are not gods ? " " Wherefore do ye turn again to the weak and beggarly 
elements of the world." That involves a reproach. In other words. What 
kind of heathens are ye ? Better than your neighbours ? Nay, you were 
not ; and ye do no better than they when ye observe days and months 
and seasons and years, (ii. ) The apostle argues that men should be as he 
is, for he is as men are. Not only is there a fine reference to himself, but 
also to the Galatian character, quick to change, to the readiness with 
which men who received Paul as an angel of God turned upon and rent 
him. Where is, then, he asks, the blessedness ye speak of ? And a refer- 
ence to their " own eyes " means that while they would have given their 
eyes to him, he as a Christian man could not receive a gift which would 
have only deformed themselves. He asks, therefore, whether he has 
become their enemy because he tells the truth. He says "it is good to be 
counted honest," and he desires that Christ again be formed in them, 
(iii.) It is here where the famous allegory of the two covenants, the two 
mountains, the two mothers, and the two sons is introduced, and we are 
said to be "not children of the bondwoman, but of the free." According 
to Jewish law the woman had the right therefore to make her child as she 
was, bond or free. (iv. ) He exhorts, therefore, men to stand fast in the 
liberty wherewith Christ hath made them free, and not to be entangled 
again with the yoke of bondage, (v.) There is the reference to circum- 
cision, which means " that if ye be circumcised Christ shall profit you 
nothing." Circumcision is said to avail nothing, nor can anything except 
faith which worketh by love, (vi.) Liberty is not to be used as giving 
the flesh its opportunity, but is the service of love, which fulfils the law. 
I hold, therefore, that Galatians as a whole was written not to one Church, 
but to many Churches, and to as many cities and sets of men. 

* Acts xvi. 1-3. t xvi. 4. 



HOW THE AUTHOR OF ACTS CONCEIVED THE GREEKS 525 

VI 

I. The author of the Acts was, as we have said, (i) a 
Greek, and (ii) he was by birth and blood opposed to 
the Jew * Now it is not possible to bring out the full 
meaning of this double statement otherwise than by an 
inquiry into another question : how are the Greeks denoted 
in the Acts of the Apostles? To discuss this point in- 
telligently, a distinction must be drawn between the author 
who is a historian and him who is simply a person. The 
historian is an author who speaks for others, while the 
person speaks for himself. The historian has to do with 
other men's opinions, while the person must be studied 
if we would know his method and his mind. 

And here we must distinguish between the author and 
the man he represents, as between ancient and modern 
nomenclature, especially in anthropology. Paul, for ex- 
ample, differs from us when he names some men "Gentiles " 
and other men "Jews," simply because he is more in search 
of a religious than of a racial distinction ; while what we 

* The author of the Acts has references which can best be explained 
by the classical knowledge which he owed partly to his birth and partly 
to his education as a physician ; the physicians of his time being an 
educated class, whose contributions to Greek philosophy and literature 
were not only of a highly elaborate and literary order, but also of scientific 
worth and of an instructive and singularly valuable kind. See Ritter, 
History of Philos., vol. iv, p. 259, and Zeller, Geschichte der Griech. Philos., 
ii, 14, both text and notes. Acts xvii. 22 ff. ; xix. 24, 27, 28, 32, 34, 
35. 39' 41 J ^xi- 28; XXV. 19; xxvii. i, 2, 4, 10, 11, 21, not to speak 
of the account of Athens, with its description of "Stoicks and 
Epicureans/' and its citation from Aratus, as given in chapter xvii., or 
verse 22 where he reports a term as being used in its strict classical 
sense — are among the instances of Greek knowledge. W^ellhausen says 
on page 86 of his commentary on Luke, " eine gangbare griechische 
Redensort" ; which is the more remarkable as he had explained an idiom 
used in the previous verses as " ein Semitismus." In these passages 
there is evidence enough to satisfy any one who knows Hebrew and 
Greek how little Luke was a Hebrew scholar and how much a Greek one. 



526 HOW JESUS AND PAUL CONCEIVED THE GENTILES. 

seek is more racial than religious. He speaks, therefore, 
as a man who thinks with the mind of a Jew concerning 
the men who are to him "Gentiles." Jesus, who in this 
respect proved Himself equal to His reputed ancestry, 
warns **the twelve"* against what He terms "the way of 
the Gentiles," f who need "conversion," { and use in prayer 
"vain repetitions," § hoping to be heard for their "loud" 
as well as their "much speaking." || Jesus did not say 
anything that in violence exceeded Jewish dislike, but 
He spoke of the Gentile as no better than a dog, Tf and Paul 
as "a Hebrew of the Hebrews"** was therefore enough a 
son of the tribe to think of the Gentiles as men who were and 
did what was evil,tt who were * * vain in their imagination, ' '{J 
who did not wish "to retain God in knowledge," given over 
to be reprobate in mind,§§ without Law, or Christ, || || or 
hope, or God.^Tf The Gentile was, therefore, to Paul as to 
Jesus, a man who worshipped "dumb idols"*** which were 
"nothing in the world "ftt ^^^ knows God "in the lust 
of concupiscence." JJ J They were men who walked in the 
vanity of their mind and in " a darkened understanding, " § § § 
and did not see the light of life. Hence he felt bound to 
speak the word of God to "the Jew first and also to the 
Greek. " 1 1 1 1 1 1 He thinks, therefore, of the Gentile as hearing 
the word of God, 1[1f If owing to the apostasy of Israel. Paul 
speaks simply as a man educated by Jews, who knew 
their distinction of race, and who, brought up in a Greek 

* Matt. X. 1,2; Mark iii. 14. f Matt. x. 5. 

X Matt. X. 18; xxiv. 14-24, 32. § Matt. vi. 7. 

II Matt, xviii, 17. ^ Mark vii. 26-28 ; Matt. xii. 21-27. 

** Phil. iii. s. ft Eph. ii. 1-3. ++ Rom. i. 21. 

§§ Rom. i. 28. nil Rom. ii. 12-15. UH Eph. ii. 11-12. 

*** I Cor. xii. 2 ; cf. Ps. cxv. 5-7 ; Jer. x. 2-5. 

ttt I Cor. viii. 4 ; x. 19. ttt i Thess. iv. 5. §§§ Eph. iv. 

mill Rom. i. 13-16; ii. 9-1 1 ; Acts xiii. 41; xviii. 5-6; xxii. 21; 

I Cor. ix. 16. ^Tf^ Rom. xi. 2, 11-12. 



ETHNOGRAPHIC TERMS TO PAUL UNKNOWN 527 

city amongst Greek men, knew theirs also. The Greek 
was to him a more refined person than the Jew, but the 
Jew was more moral than the Greek. Paul laid emphasis 
on this point, insisting that the Jew, therefore, was the 
stronger.* Modern knowledge and ideas have in this 
respect stood more by the Jew than by the Greek, for we 
hold the moral to be simpler and broader, purer and more 
fundamental, than any intellectual difference. We agree, 
therefore, with Paul in holding that the race which wor- 
shipped wisdom had more vanity, though less truth, than 
the race which worshipped God. Now where God is wor- 
shipped as sucb He is conceived as no respecter of persons, 
belonging neither to Jew nor Greek, but simply to man.f 
And Paul did not think that while the speech he daily used 
was Greek, and the law he daily obeyed was Roman, yet 
that either he or any one of his blood stood on a lower level 
than the lowest of the Latin races. There is indeed nothing 
too audacious in the sphere of personal superiority for 
racial vanity to assert. 

2. While Paul as apostle to the Gentiles magnified his 
office, still, as a Jew who had been in training for a rabbi, he 
was made welcome in the synagogue, where he testified that 
Jesus was the Christ. J The distinction, therefore, between 

* I Cor. V. I. Paul here expresses shame at a sin, which even 
Gentiles are so ashamed of as not even to name, being known among 
Christians. The deference to law as moral he brought from Jerusalem. 
Of. Rom. xi. II, 13. 

f Rom. ii. II ; Gal. ii. 6 ; Eph. vi. 9 ; Col. iii. 25 ; Rom. iii. 29-30. 

I What, then, is the relation between the Acts of the Apostles 
and the Pauline Epistles ? It has been represented as strained, and the 
strain has been, at any rate since the days of Baur, very much exaggerated 
and criticized. The third Gospel has the other two synoptics, as well as 
the fourth, to be compared with, but the Acts of the Apostles stands alone, 
though so far as it relates to Paul it can be corrected and supplemented 
by his epistles. There is no doubt that to challenge the Book of Acts 
is to measure it by modern standards, which it cannot face and stand un- 



528 WHAT GREEK SIGNIFIED TO THE JEW. 

the Jew and Gentile, though begun in the Old Testament, 
was yet followed in the New. But in the apocryphal 
literature a step forward is taken, and ''Greek" is sub- 
stituted for "Gentile." This linguistic change signified 
(i) that the term had become more extensive, (ii) that Greek 
was the current speech of man, and as far as the Jewish 
knowledge of him went the term went, and (iii) there was 
associated with the term its antithesis, which embraced the 
Jew as well as the Gentile, and so denoted mankind. In- 
deed, while the author of the Acts cannot write his history 
without dependence on Hellenistic reports by Jewish men, 
yet his use of the term is such as betrays his Hellenic descent. 
We can say, therefore, that the author of the Acts was not 

changed, especially if the epistles speak seriously touching Paul. The 
remarkable things are: (i.) how little Paul speaks concerning his inner 
experience and his past life; (ii.) how little Acts speaks concerning 
not merely the Pauline Epistles, but their origin ; and (iii. ) how little 
certain minor characters in his life, like Titus, are noted. And these are 
not what are expected in a modern biography, and we can only bring 
use and wont to bear in our criticism in a case like this. It is possible, 
indeed, that Baur may have much exaggerated, and we confess that Luke, 
as a writer, has had very hard measure dealt out to him. I may take as 
a single instance his relations to the Synagogue. The Synagogue played in 
the Acts a very considerable part, and in the history of the Christian Church 
it played a part still more considerable, especially in two respects, (i.) It 
became a model to the Church of organization and of fitness for work ; 
and (ii. ) the Synagogue was the place where Paul met many Jews, and 
there alone devout persons, or proselytes, could be found. It is not pos- 
sible to conceive any just reason why Titus, for example, should not be 
recognized. It is not true that he is ignored of set purpose any more than 
Luke himself is, whose name does not once occur in the Acts, as either the 
author or as a companion of Paul. And Titus is dealt with similarly, 
not because he has an epistle to himself, and is referred to frequently in 
2 Corinthians, especially in chapters ii. vii. viii. and xii., and in 
Galatians ii. i, 3 he is made to play a notable part in a grand con- 
troversy. Yet his non-appearance has nothing trivial in it. We may be 
astonished why Titus does not appear in the Acts, yet we are astonished 
without sufficient reason. If Luke's attitude to the Synagogue be taken 
account of as well as his attitude to Judaism as a whole, then his attitude 
to Titus who, like himself, is a Greek is not surprising. 



OUR AUTHOR JUDGES THE JEW AS ONLY THE GREEK COULD 529 

only a man from Macedonia, but he had also the peculiar 
Greek nature which hated the Jew and anticipated good 
results from Paul's incursion into Europe. 

3 . Our author thought, indeed , that the European Greeks 
were certain to be either more favourable or more indifferent 
to the new religion than any Eastern race. To his mortifi- 
cation he found that neither expectation was verified. The 
fairness and the truth of the man stand revealed in the 
way he describes Paul's adventures at Philippi, Thessa- 
lonica, and Beroea. At Philippi, while many welcomed the 
Apostle and while the city proved worthy of Macedonia, 
of Greece, and of its own history and preeminence, it was, 
as a whole, hostile.* He may have been one of the crowd 
which **sat by the river side" and ** spake unto the women 
who resorted thither." He may have been of those ** con- 
strained " by Lydia to enter her house and abide there. He 
may have been followed by the ''damsel possessed with a 
spirit of divination " ; but we know he was not with " Paul 
and Silas" when they were taken before "the magis- 
trates,"! charged with ** being Jews" and "teaching 
customs" which no law-abiding Roman could observe. 
And the multitude rose up together against "Paul and 
Silas," who were "cast into prison," with their "feet made 
fast in the stocks." Therefore the brethren needed to be 
comforted. At Thessalonica, where was a synagogue of the 
Jews, Paul, "according to his manner," used it, "open- 
ing and alleging that Christ must needs have suffered and 
risen again from the dead," and "that this Jesus" is indeed 
"the Messiah." "And some of them believed." For 
them to believe was also for them to "consort wdth Paul 
and Silas." "A great multitude" of the Greek prose- 

* The travel document, which begins at Troas, continues at Philippi. 
(Acts xvi. 11-18.) t xvi. 20 ff. 

2 M 



530 THE GREEK DESCRIBES HIS OWN CITIES AS PAGAN. 

lytes believed. It was then when "the Jews which be- 
Heved not, moved with envy, took unto them certain lewd 
fellows of the baser sort, and gathered a company and set 
all the city on an uproar," and cried to its rulers: "These 
men that have turned the world upside down are come 
hither."* Then Paul and Silas are sent away to Beroea, 
where they "went into the synagogue of the Jews." f And 
we read that the men of Beroea were "more noble" than 
the men of Thessalonica in that they searched the Scriptures 
"with all readiness of mind" to discover "whether things 
were so." The result is said to be that "many of them 
believed." J But when the "Jews of Thessalonica had 
knowledge that the word of God was preached of Paul 
at Beroea," they came as a multitude and "stirred up the 
people";! and Paul went towards the sea, leaving Silas 
and Timotheus behind. The brethren who conducted 
him brought him to Athens, where he stayed some days. 
While at Athens we read that Paul, while waiting for Timo- 
theus and Silas, had "his spirit stirred" by seeing the city 
"wholly given to idolatry." He disputes "in the syna- 
gogue with the Jews and with the proselytes," and daily 
"in the market with them that met him." "Certain 
philosophers of the Epicureans and of the Stoicks encoun- 
tered him, and some said. What will this babbler say? 
Others said, He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange 
gods," confounding the Deity not only with Jesus, but also 
with the Resurrection. 1 1 The author of the Acts char- 
acterized as well as criticized the Athenians, who are said to 
spend "their time in nothing else but either to hear or tell 
some new thing." If Athens was the most characteristic 
of Greek cities, and it was characteristic, for it was not only 

* Acts xvii. 1-8. t xvii. lo. J xvii. 11-12. 

§ xvii. 13. II xvii. 16-18. ^ xvii. 21. 



WHAT ATHENS SEEMED TO BOTH JEW AND GREEK 53 1 

a city of trade, but preeminently of learning, and the ancient 
Greek was nothing if not learned. It was a city where men 
were educated, and where they therefore regarded every 
person who visited it as seeking wisdom : no other purpose 
was recognized by them and theirs. We have, then, in 
Athens a city that is a type of Greece at its best and noblest. 
It may not have been very noble, but it was Greece at its 
best, and Greece was courteous, though neither flexible nor 
easily moved. Here, then, we must imagine Paul; among 
a race which knew its intellectual superiority to the rest 
of mankind, and in a city it had created as its congenial 
home. The population was too typically Greek to be 
inflamed by any foreign race, especially by one esteemed 
lower than itself, like the Jews. But even in this city they 
had a synagogue, which Paul sought out, and where he 
"disputed," though not with a crowd of ''the baser sort," 
"lewd fellows," the scum and offscouring of great cities. 
At Athens, however, he made two notable discoveries: 
(i) that curiosity to hear was not the same thing as the 
passion to know, and (ii) that the politeness which listened 
for news was generically unlike the desire which listened 
for the voice of God and wished to obey His truth. And 
these discoveries resulted in changed feelings. Paul found 
that polite indifference was more hostile than even the 
passion of the crowd. The easy tolerance of error is but a 
poor substitute for diligent search for God. And so Athens 
produced its inevitable influence in the mind of the per- 
sons who sought for Deity more earnestly than men dig for 
secret treasure. But Paul could not leave without speech ; 
and his address at Athens is reported. And the report is, 
though condensed, yet a fair sample of what Paul was 
accustomed to say to cultivated heathen. He begins to 
speak as a cultured Jew, though he ends as a Christian. He 



532 PAUL ON MARS HILL; THE ATHENIANS 

was too courteous an opponent to use the phrase, ''You are 
too superstitious." * Superstition is the thing that sur- 
vives or the behef that lasts out of one state, which is lower, 
into another state, which is the higher. And so we say, 
not "too superstitious," but ''too much given to religious 
observances." For ye are "excessive in your reverence, 
and multiply too easily objects of devotion." And then, as 
is his wont, as he had done in the address which is set down 
as delivered by him in the synagogue at Pisidian Antioch, 
he cannot proceed without a text, and cites one, as it were, 
where he has "found an altar with this inscription, To the 
unknown God." t This God is revealed (i) as the Creator 
who made the World, (ii) as the Lord of Heaven and Earth, 
(iii) as dwelling not in Temples made with hands, for He 
not only made the World, but He governs it; and so 
(iv) He has made of one blood all nations of men to dwell 
on the whole face of the earth ; J (v) but He has definitely 
decided that they shall seek Him. That leads to the 
famous saying, "In Him we live and move and have our 
being" ; and then "certain of their own poets" are quoted 
as saying, "We are also His offspring." § From this there 
follows a strictly Jewish conclusion: — "Since we are the 
offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Deity is like 
unto gold or silver or stone, graven by the art and the 
device of man " 1 1 — though it is obvious that history, which 
has falsified the argument, ought not to be trusted as a mere 
revelation of God . But, here speaks the Christian as distinct 
from the Jew : — it is evident "the command to repent," as 
well as all the previous positions, involves more than a bare 
and bald theism, whether Jewish and historical, or natural. 
A relation of the Creator to Nature exclusive of man cannot 
be called "natural"; for (i) the same God who created 

* Acts xvii. 22. t xvii. 23. { xvii. 26, § xvii. 28. || xvii. 29. 



GIVEN GREATLY TO RELIGIOUS OBSERVANCES 533 

and governs man appointed in the person of Christ a Judge 
for the world; (ii) God will judge the world, but He can 
do so only by deputing one who has lived in it and led it ; 
(iii) "in righteousness"; no one but a ''righteous judge" 
could do it, and to be righteous is to be merciful ; (iv) He 
must ''judge the world" as He must measure it by man; 
(v) the only man God can trust is the man whom He had 
ordained as Judge of "quick and dead" ; (vi) men needed 
to be sure their faith was right : such assurance God gave 
who raised Him from the dead. That was more than even 
the Greeks could stand. The word there became too in- 
sistent to please them ; ' ' some mocked and others ' ' politely 
"said. We will hear thee again of this matter." But we 
read, "Howbeit some clave unto Him." God had not left 
Himself without a witness even in Athens. 

vn 

I . "Paul departed from Athens and came to Corinth," * 
"and he continued there a year and six months teaching the 
Word of God." t The most marvellous result of his visit 
is in Acts passed over in silence : — his learning to express 
himself in literary form, always a difficult art to acquire, 
and an art as unique as it is difficult. For in Corinth he 
writes epistles as dissimilar as those "to the Thessalo- 
nians" and "to the Galatians." But there are the three 
events which all concern either persons or their respective 
peoples, described in our narrative : — (i) Paul was of the 
same craft as Aquila, with whom he is said to have worked 
and lodged. J This Aquila is never mentioned without 
his wife, Priscilla.§ Aquila is said to be a Jew, though 

* Acts xviii, I. t xviii. ii. J xviii. 3. 

§ In the Pauline Epistles she bears the name Prisca, which is without the 
termination that makes it into a diminutive (Rom. xvi. 3; i Cor. xvi. 19; 
2 Tim. iv. 19). Priscilla is a form it invariably assumes in the more familiar 
style of Acts (Acts xviii. 2, 18, 26). 



534 PAUL IN THE SYNAGOGUE AT CORINTH. 

''born in Pontus/'* and the Emperor Claudius "had 
commanded all Jews to depart from Rome," where the 
husband and the wife had together lived. Silas and Timo- 
theus had come from Macedonia .f 

(ii) "Paul reasoned in the Synagogue"! and we read 
further that he "testified,"" "Jesus is the Messiah." But 
when the Jews "blasphemed he shook out his raiment," § 
which has been described as the act of an angry man. The 
Jews were often found dwelling in the neighbourhood of the 
Synagogue, and several people are named as in the Church 
at Corinth whom we know to have been Jewish either in 
blood or by faith, like the Justus, into whose house, which 
"joined hard to the Synagogue," Paul entered ;|| and 
"the chief Ruler of the Synagogue," Crispus, who "believed 
on the Lord with all his house." ^ Many of the Corinthians 
are also said to believe and to be baptized, though we know 
that Paul mainly prided himself on Christ having sent him 
to preach the Gospel and not to baptize in His name.** 

(iii) As to the third incident which concerns Gallio,tt 
Statins J J and Seneca, §§ who was Nero's tutor yet Gallio's 
younger brother, who, as uncle of the poet Lucan, was of 
quite a literary family, unite in applying to him the same 
term, dulcis; and so make us seem as if we stood near a sweet 
and generous man. Of Claudius he perpetrates the one 

* xviii. 2. This is one of the important incidents connected with the 
Roman Empire embedded in Acts. For another, which also concerns 
Claudius, see xi. 28. 

f xviii. 5. Silas seems to have died during the mission in Corinth, 
for he does not again appear in Acts. 

X Acts xviii. 4, 5. § xviii. 6. || xviii. 7. 

*[[ xviii. 8. Paul alludes to Crispus (i Cor. i. 14). 
** I Cor. i. 13, 15, 17. 

•j-f xviii. 12-17. He owed his surname of Gallio to a simple fact: his 
adoption as a son by Junius Gallio, a rhetorician (cf. Tacitus, Ann. vi. 3). 
Achaia was the name of the Roman province which had been the king- 
dom of Greece in which Corinth was. Gallio is described as pro- consul 
of Achaia. 1% Silv. xxvii. 32. §§ Nat. Qu., Preface, §4. 



GALLIC ; PAUL'S MENTAL GROWTH 535 

literary witticism which still survives as his. The em- 
peror, a most timid and worthless man, who had been 
poisoned by Agrippina, and speaks of him as of an emperor 
who had experienced apotheosis and was with the gods, yet 
as a criminal who had been drawn ''with a hook" through 
the streets * Read in the light of the character usually 
given to him, Gallio was not indifferent to religion, but 
rather a man who, as sweet in nature, loved sweetness 
in religion. There was nothing that pleased a Jew, or 
that displeased a Roman, more than to be a martyr for his 
faith ; but Jewish orthodoxy was too much inclined to build 
on authority, rather than on the law in the man. While 
Gallio understood Roman law, he did not understand the 
Jewish, and he refused to interfere with Judaism or simply 
with religion. The conclusion he reached had nothing to 
do with religion as such, though it had first reference to 
the beating of Sosthenes before his judgment seat. 

2. Paul's residence in Corinth we have said was remark- 
able for the growth of his mind . This growth is mainly seen 
in the epistles that bear his name, and that form the basis of 
our New Testament. While he contributes to it in literary 
material less than Luke, and only a little more than Mark 
and Matthew combined, it is yet more than doubtful 
whether it could have been without him. There is in our 
canon much that is anonymous, much also pseudonymous. 
Some books bear the name of the authors, others the per- 
son or persons, or society addressed; some are written 
by the person whose name they bear, others claim to be 
the work of men who did not know the ideas they praised, 
or the institutions they approved. Some have had names 
assigned them by a tradition which knew neither the men 
it proclaimed as authors, nor the ideas they were credited 

* Diocassius, Ix, 35. 



536 Paul's letters, not merely literary, 

with preaching. Others — notably the PauHne letters — 
have had names affixed by a tradition so sober and sure that 
its judgment has been more confirmed than shaken by 
modern research. Only a hasty inquirer would say that 
to be found false in one thing is to be proved capable of 
falsity in all. — Though the authors be obscure and un- 
known, yet the words are not as the men are, provincial in 
spirit and in blood. While as a rule they are men without 
culture or literary faculty, who write in what was a foreign 
tongue acquired imperfectly because late in life, still they 
have, in spite of their undistinguished and unclassical style, 
yet produced a literature which, in its appeal to the intellect 
and conscience, to the imagination and heart, to the sense 
of the eternal, and the feeling of the good in man, stands 
absolutely alone amid the literatures of the world. 

3. The Pauline letters, while not intended to be historical, 
are so really. They show us the actual Church, but suggest 
the ideal. They show us how Christian men then lived 
and thought, how, while forming the actual world, they 
yet reached out into an ideal; how they endeavoured to 
read the mind, to reproduce the character, and to interpret 
the person of Him whom they adored; how they had 
struggled and succeeded, which caused the writer pleasure; 
and failed, which caused him pain. They ought to be 
conceived as contemporary documents, glowing with an 
ideal too large and too comprehensive to be impersonated 
by those who simply wanted a new religion, and were 
contented that it was not as the old. For it is incorrect 
to say that these letters are without historical interest, or 
even significance. So much indeed is this opposed to fact 
that their characteristics may be summed up thus : — (i) 
They are contemporary documents which witness to facts 
of primary importance; their very biographical becomes 



BUT historical; character of their history 537 

an historical interest when they testify to the quaHty of the 
ideas that filled their writer's mind, (ii) They show the 
growth of Christian ideas and institutions, their action on 
old environments, and the action of new environments 
on them, (iii) They exhibited the continuity of the Old 
Testament with the New, and its interpretation by a 
Jew who had lived both within and without Palestine; 
and by the Christian, whether of Jewish, Greek, Roman, 
or mixed descent. (iv) They show also how the new 
religion was influenced by Roman ideas of law and justice, 
especially by the dream of empire, and the consequent 
ideal of character. (v) We can trace the mode and the 
degree in which the Greek mind affected the Christian, 
and, in the moment of early collision, forecast the future, 
(vi) They reveal also the action of the varied races upon 
the religion — races it now attracted and now repelled, 
the way the men it converted behaved, whether within or 
without the Church, (vii) They also show what were 
the social and religious ideas which were common to all 
mankind, and what ideas the new religion introduced. 

VIII 

I . Letters and literature are distinct, yet related, whether 
as ideas or as things. Books which are here conceived as 
constituting literature, are impersonal, and offer what is 
significant in and for itself, or things which tend to educa- 
tion and culture, to philosophy and science, to history 
and knowledge. But letters which are written messages 
are personal, and possess the qualities of good conversation, 
serving a like purpose. They are written by intelligent 
men to men of intellect in order to annihilate the space 
which divides persons, though it may create the absence 
which makes the heart grow fonder. Yet the distinction 



538 HOW THE PAULINE EPISTLES ARE TO BE STUDIED. 

is strictly relative, for the letter, as more personal than 
the book, is written to instruct or amuse certain individuals 
by informing them of what has happened to the writer, and 
the letter which fails to interest fails utterly as regards 
its purpose. The Pauline letters are written to a Church 
by an absent teacher, and have as their immediate prac- 
tical purpose the direction of the persons addressed, who 
to the person addressing them represent the world. They 
are epistles, therefore, that speak truth to all and for all, 
though the truth they speak is swathed in local forms and 
ephemeral allusions. 

2 . The Pauline letters must therefore be studied as letters 
which are designed to dispel ignorance, yet as expressing 
ideas of permanent value, and of individual interest. Their 
writer makes Christianity literary. It is possible that this 
was his greatest achievement. Not only are his letters 
the oldest documents of the Christian religion, but also its 
translation into the literary forms that were then current 
and common. While destined at its birth to speak the 
language of Syria, it yet came to use the tongue of Greece ; 
and in this alien speech it felt more at home than even in 
the tongue in which it was born. The nature expressed 
in these letters is older than the religion because as old as 
man. In them is humanity with its lofty idealism, with its 
strength of conviction, its heroism and devotion, its love 
and majesty, with its bigotry and intolerance, its fear of 
change, its hatred of suspicion. These epistles must there- 
fore be read as genuine letters, beautiful with emotion, 
tender, wistful, gracious, yet scored with passion, dark, 
stern and unyielding. They are letters which can be called 
with truth human documents, because alive with man's 
common instincts, zeal for truth, love to man, the yearning 
of the heart for the absent albeit it is a brother, the desire to 



THE PERSONALITY REVEALED IN THE LETTERS 539 

lead him or to keep him in the way of right and of peace. In 
other words, human nature is there in its strength and in 
its weakness, soft yet severe, rich in an awed humiHty and 
vain majesty; full of tenderness to the penitent, gentleness 
to the erring, yet to men who love evil, as stern as God. 
Sweet and graciously courteous is the writer, tempering 
with mercy the fierce fanaticism of the convert. The mind 
of Jesus is seen trying to make its home in man, teaching 
him to die for the truth, to bear all things gladly in its name, 
and for His sake. 

3 . But it is not enough so to read the Pauline letters. We 
only begin to understand them when we know the man by 
whom they are written. Paul has nothing to conceal, and 
conceals nothing. He is a man proud of his descent, yet 
ashamed of those who share it.* He loves the Jewish 
people, their Fathers and their great traditions,! their 
religion which had done so much for him, J their rites which 
his parents had observed in his own case,§ their customs 
to which he had conformed, || the party to which he had 
belonged, If their law,** the revelation which had come 
through them,f I and the Christ they had, as it were, begotten 
from their own loins. JJ The God he loves knows no differ- 
ence between Jew and Gentile, §§ and he honours Christ 
because He has abolished ''the middle wall of partition" 
and made the divided race one. 1 1 1 1 He is willing to be ' ac- 
cursed from Christ" for his brethren, his "kinsmen accord- 
ing to the flesh, "Tf If yet though for their sakes he would en- 
dure the gravest penalty, and says that his heart's desire is 
that Israel should be saved,*** he will not, even for their 

* Rom. ii. 17-29; Phil. iii. 4-6; Gal. iv. 12, 17, 18, 21-31. 

f Rom. iv. I ff. ; ix. 4; xi. i ; Gal. iii. 15. J Gal. i. 14. 

§ Phil. iii. 5. II 2 Cor. xi. 22 ; , Phil. iii. 6. ^ Phil. iii. 5 ; cf. Acts xxvi. 5. 
** Rom. iii. 31 ; vii. i, 7, 12; xiii. 10; Gal. ii. 19. ff Rom. iii. 2. 

II Rom. ix. 5. §§ Rom. iii, 22, 29, 30. || || Eph. ii. 14, 15 ; Rom. v. 11. 
^^ Rom. ix. 3. ' *** Rom. X. i. 



540 

salvation, yield one iota of his faith ; for he holds man to be 
greater than Israel, and God greater than man. The man's 
conscience is mightier than his heart, his reason stronger 
than his emotions,"^ for to him the ideals of life alone make 
it worth living. And so the spiritual has become greater 
than the material Israel ;t Abraham, the father of the 
faithful, is a sublime patriarch, with a far larger and more 
illustrious progeny than a narrow and intolerant race.J 
Hence the note of the new Israel is "the circumcision of 
the heart," a life "in the Spirit, not in the letter, whose 
praise is not of man, but of God."§ The God he serves 
has "no respect of persons. "|| He justifies the men who 
do the law, but gives no preference to the men who have 
or who hear it. If He who lives under the law may be first 
in privilege, but he is first also in responsibility,** if re- 
sponsibility before God signifies responsibility for man. 
The Gospel he preaches is designed equally for Jew and 
Gentile,tt is meant to abolish distinctions of speech and 
state, of race and rank ; J J to be faithless here would be to 
be false to God as well as to man, and to allow the con- 
ventions of time to triumph over the principles and ideals 
of eternity. Hence he withstands the illiberal Christian 
as he had withstood the conventional Jew;§§ he hears the 
voice of the unborn generations, and he will not barter 
their inheritance for his own miserable peace. 

And so in his letters we see the old in death-grips 
with the new, which it resists, hates, fears. And 
while the old calls up the forces of ancient prejudice 
and invulnerable fanaticism to stand against and cast 

* Rom. ii. 13-15. t Roni. ix. 6, 24-28. 

I Rom. iv. 12, 13 ; Gal. iii. 7-9, 29. § Rom. ii. 28, 29. 

II Rom. ii. II ; Gal. ii. 6; Eph. vi. 9; Col. iii. 25. 

Tl Rom. ii. 13, 14. ** Rom. ii. 9, 10. fj Rom. i. 16. 

+ + Gal. iii. 28. §§ Gal. ii. 11-14. 



WHICH ARE HISTORICAL WITHOUT TEACHING HISTORY 541 

out the new, yet we see the new claiming its inheritance 
in the old, and breaking it into pieces if it will not 
quietly give up and give out the truth it was created to 
serve, all which means that what is of time will perish 
and what of eternity endure. We should think all the 
worse of human nature if these Pauline letters had never 
been written, were it only to teach us how reluctant man 
is to become good, and how the forces of night and chaos 
within him contend against the powers of grace and truth 
which descend out of heaven from God. They help us to 
measure the strength and the breadth of the Gospel by 
showing how it vanquished the man who contended against 
its mercy and struggled to keep its love as narrow and 
bitter as his own hate. He who does not see these things in 
the Pauline letters, will be quite unable to perceive any 
reason for their being at all or why they formed the nucleus 
of the canon. He who does thus see will know by what 
right they stand where they do, and how they could stand 
nowhere else in the whole range of Christian literature. 

4. The letters, then, fill us with admiration for their 
author, for his strength, his candour, his integrity, his 
moral passion, his intellectual penetration and fearlessness. 
He unifies all, stands a rare and genuine human personality 
with all his ancient hates sacrificed to one abiding love, un- 
ashamed of the affection which lies deep within him, and now 
overflows in his words, and now chokes his utterance. He 
seems, then, a man, real, sane, stalwart, upright, strong in 
judgment, prudent, yet kind in speech, tolerant, yet brave 
in temper, a rare personality, incapable of using language 
to deceive those who wished to be deceived, of playing 
either with his own soul or another man's. He is the man 
of all the apostles most worthy of trust. Men who could 
have agreed in nothing else would certainly agree in saying : 



542 THE LAW AND JUDAISM IN THE EPISTLES. 

"He is the person, whether we regard the time or the race, 
most competent to write a contemporary document which 
shall, if only by the way, witness to the truth of the new 
religion, and speak of its Founder as He ought to be spoken 
about." For his letters move us now with pity, now with 
scorn, here with love, and there with aversion, for the men 
they are written to, or about, or against. We dare not do 
other than sympathize with those who so loved the God 
their fathers had worshipped, and the way in which they 
had worshipped Him as to have no choice but to adhere 
to Him and the ancient ways were it only for the fathers' 
sakes.* Our feelings may draw us towards the man who 
so feels the fascination of the idol that he dare not go near 
his temple ; t yet they drive us away from him who allows 
his old sins to govern his new life.J We find it hard to be 
tolerant to the ''weak brother" who so feels his weakness 
as to judge another as if he were God, in respect of ''meats 
and drinks, "§ but we are moved to tolerance by the plea of 
the strong man who reminds us that even for "the weak 
brother" Christ died.|| These are beautiful sayings, al- 
together worthy of the man who loved much, yet spoke 
little of love: — "No man liveth to himself or dieth to 
himself." "Whether we live, we live unto the Lord; and 
whether we die, we die unto the Lord."^ "For meat 
destroy not the work of God."** "Why is my liberty 
judged by another conscience?" "Whether ye eat or 
drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of 

God."tt 

5 . The letters possess therefore certain common features ; 
they are local yet universal, and discuss particular facts 

* Acts xxiv. 14. t I Cor. xiii, 4-10. t Ihid. 12. 

§ Rom. xiv. 1-4; XV. i. |1 Rom. xv. 15; i Cor. viii. 13. 

^ Rom. xiv, 7, 8. ** Ibid. xiv. 20. ft i Cor. x. 29-31. 



THE THESSALONIAN AND THE GALATIAN EPISTLES 543 

in the light of general principles. Paul learns by practice 
the art of putting abstract and abstruse things in letters, 
and it has to be noted that the value of literature has, in 
general, a new meaning to him after he has been in Athens. 
And so 1st and 2nd Thessalonians get written near the 
beginning of his stay in Corinth. They are simple in style, 
and in matter more comparable to the speeches reported in 
Acts than to the later letters which proceed from his pen. 
He shows his humility by associating with himself, as if they 
were joint authors of his epistles,* "Silas and Timothy." 
He alludes to his shameful treatment at Philippi before 
he came to Thessalonica,t and his loneliness at Athens after 
he had left it.J He also refers to the fact that he and they 
suffered especially from the Jews, and that they were 
examples to all who believed. § Towards the end of his 
stay in Corinth he writes to the Galatian Churches an 
elaborate and highly technical epistle which is quite unlike 
either of the earlier ones, while it forecasts his future emi- 
nence as a writer of letters; in particular it lets us know 
how he was affected by his converts as well as by the place, 
for it is full of the genius loci. The influence of Athens 
can be traced both upon him and upon Corinth, which 
was imitative of what we should call the Capital of Greece, 
though Corinth was the larger and richer city. The influ- 
ence of atmosphere as a quite real thing can be traced, for 
it affected the independence of Corinth, and even the 
character of its sons. The city had more than a Greek 
jealousy for its freedom, while as regards education and 
speech, its sons were made sensitive to style by the neigh- 
bourhood of Athens. The reference indeed to a perfect 
man means simply a man perfectly educated or full 

* I and 2 Thess. i. i. f i Thess. ii. 2. 

{ I Thess. iii. i. §1 Thess. i. 7, 8; ii. 14-16." 



544 THE CORINTHIAN CHURCH LIKE THE CITY. 

grown* As was the city such was the church; jealous 
for its rights, its freedom, its competency, its power to 
correct the offender if such there be, and Paul shows him- 
self as jealous for freedom as either the city or the church, 
adding to his love of liberty the idea as to its rights and 
duties. And he reasons with them as reasonable men. 

* I Cor. ii. 6; xiii. lo; xiv. 20. 



IX 
PAUL IN ASIA AND IN PRISON 



I. T)AUL, not indeed till he felt that his work in Corinth 
^ was completed, turned back from Europe to Asia, 
following his heart as he had before followed his conscience 
from Asia to Europe. But it was not the old Asia he went 
to; it was but a Roman province whose capital, Ephesus,* 
stood by the sea near Corinth, though on the main road to 
the East. But it was still nearer in trade, and therefore in 
character, to the Greek city. While just opposite vSamos, 
and therefore sharing its maritime fame, it was also the 
home of a peculiar religion, Asiatic in origin and in nature, 
with a people which, while devoted to their own religion, 
were so organized as to be able to speak on its behalf to the 
world. Yet Paul, though he spent a very much longer time 
in Asia than in Greece, did not feel as happy there, partly 
because he was uncomfortable from not being in the path 
of duty.f Why he brought away from Achaia Aquila and 
his wife, we can, in a measure, at least, in view of what 
is said later, understand.} From Ephesus he sailed to 
Caesarea,§ whence he went up to Jerusalem and saluted the 
saints there. When he had paid his respects to the local 
church, he went down to Antioch, which, as more polyglot 
than Jerusalem, and in spirit more free and universal, was 

* Acts xviii. 19. t Acts xix. 8-10. 

J Acts xviii. 18, 21, 28. § Acts xviii. 21-22. 

2 N 545 



54<5 • EPHESUs: the character of apollos. 

a fitter home for him than the capital of his own race with 
its narrow and timid and intolerant temper * And thence 
he started on another missionary journey, which he began 
as on previous occasions, with the Galatian cities and 
churches.f In going over the region of Galatia and Phrygia 
in order, he strengthened the disciples, and through them 
the churches.f 

But it is mainly with Ephesus, and with what is known 
of his conduct there, as well as its conduct to him, that we 
are to be concerned. There we first meet Apollos, who is 
termed "a Jew born at Alexandria," and *'an eloquent 
man, mighty in the Scriptures." Yet he, though a diligent 
student of them, had not known till enlightened by Aquila 
the way of God,§ a way he quite frankly confessed he did 
not know in full. He reversed the procedure of Paul, and 
passed from Ephesus to Corinth, where he ** mightily" 
convinced the Jews, ** publicly showing by their own Scrip- 
tures that Jesus was the Messiah." 1 1 Apollos so succeeded 
at Corinth as to form a party which was strong enough 
for Paul to reckon with, and as became an eloquent man, 
he was learned and so he stood nearer Athens and its spirit 
than his contemporary. He had, besides, more of human- 
ity in him than the parties of either Peter or Christ. ^ The • 
party which was named after Christ did not speak Jesus' 
own mind, but the mind of men who proved their inferiority 
by their inability to apprehend His meaning, and so they 
presumed to speak for Him, and interpret Him. 

2. The mental growth of Paul continued in Ephesus as 
remarkable as it had been in Corinth, and by the epistles 
there written we possess a means of judging what it must 

* Acts xiii. 1-4; XV. 40-41. 
t Acts xiii. 13 ff. ; xiv. 11 ff.; xvi. 1-6. 
J Acts xviii. 23. § Acts xviii. 24. 

II Acts xviii. 27-28. ^ I Cor, i. 12. 



Paul's jealousy for his converts 547 

have been. What he continued to write expressed a 
universal soHcitude for his converts, whom he termed his 
"beloved sons." Though they might have, he said, "ten 
thousand instructors in Christ," yet they had not and 
could not have a corresponding number of fathers.* All 
his lettersf were marked by three things: (a) extraor- 
dinary emphasis on personal and ethical qualities ; {^) the 

* I Cor. iv. 14-15. 

t The first letter to the Corinthian church was written from 
Ephesus, and falls into sections which make it significant. These sections 
are mainly two : the (i.) discusses the parties within the church, and 
raises also questions in which it was deeply interested. It embraces 
chapters i.-vi., and in Paul's customary method closes with a doxology 
(i Cor, vi. 20). (ii.) The second section extends from chapter vii.-xv., 
excluding xvi., which yet, with its salutations and directions to the church, 
forms a fitting termination to the whole. 

I. In the division which extends from i. to vi. we simply note 
that we have a discussion which well illustrates the temper of the 
city, and the influence exercised upon it by the neighbourhood of 
Athens, and upon the writer himself by his bitter and untoward 
experiences there. Man is not only gregarious, but he is also, what makes 
his very gregariousness significant, susceptible to influence. The life lived 
by Corinth and its citizens was urban, yet it reflected the same spirit as 
lived in its potent neighbour, (i.) The spirit was seen in many things, 
particularly in the rise of parties within the church. Some said, " We are 
of Paul " ; others said, " We are of Apollos " ; others, " We are of Cephas," 
the chief apostle ; but a fourth party said, " We are of Christ " (i Cor. i. 12). 
What the parties signified we need not here specifically discuss, though 
the parties of " Cephas " and of " Christ " have been, with good historical 
reasons, identified with the Judaisers of the Galatian epistle, (ii.) Nothing 
could have insulted the Corinthian church more than to identify it with 
any person, particularly if a Jew. There was in consequence remarkable 
jealousy as to Paul himself. We know so much as that from his own 
teaching, which stands particularly clear in i. 13-17. That has to do with 
Paul as baptizing, and he is grateful that his custom has kept him from 
baptizing any save Crispus and Gains. His reasons were (a) lest any one 
should say, " I baptized in my own name " ; {j3) Christ sent him not to 
baptize, but to preach the Gospel ; and (7) he kept no register of any 
baptisms he had administered, (iii.) We see that the proximity of Athens 
had affected not only the Greeks, but the Jews, and even Paul himself. 
Hence he has much to say about the foolishness of preaching, about the 
wisdom of Deity, and we can feel how often the same event must have 
seemed different to different men, especially as the neighbourhood of 



548 THE FIRST LETTER TO THE CORINTHIANS: 

fear, for those converted by him, lest he had "be- 

Athens made all Greeks and all who used the tongue of Greece and yet 
lived, as did the men of Corinth, within the Athenian sphere of influence, 
susceptible to the Greek spirit, (iv.) There are two subjects discussed in 
the second chapter, (a) One paragraph which extends from i to 5 empha- 
sizes the fact that his preaching was not " with excellency of wisdom," 
but he was with them " in weakness and fear and much trembling," 
having come to Corinth from Athens, a man who " did not determine to 
know anything save Christ crucified," and consequently with a Faith 
which did not stand in the wisdom of men, " but in the power of God." 
And all references to man's wisdom, which is an affair of words, needs 
to be read in the light of the fact that Corinth was within the sphere 
of Athenian influence, cultivated criticism and independence, or love of 
freedom. But (j8) in the second paragraph there is a very striking con- 
trast drawn between the wisdom of the world which, as practical, " comes to 
nought," and the wisdom which, as uncreated, proceeds from God, and 
is described as hidden, in a mystery or a spectacle the eyes can see and 
the hands can handle, " ordained of God before the foundation of the 
world unto our glory." That, in a purely Pauline way, is confirmed by a 
quotation he adopts and adapts from the Old Testament : " Eye hath 
not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath entered into the heart of man the 
things which God hath prepared for them that love Him " (Isaiah iv. 4). 
(v.) In the third chapter this theme is continued in the speech which says, 
" Unto you as unto babes in Christ " the message is given, (a) We have 
only to think of what the church at Corinth thought of itself, and of its 
city and people, to feel the audacity of Paul in speaking to them as " unto 
babes in Christ " who are " not spiritual but carnal " persons. (j3) The 
parties are then taken up, the Pauline and Apollonian alone, to the exclu- 
sion of the Petrine and the Christians, being represented. He turns back 
on the first position and asks, " Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, 
save ministers by whom ye believed ? " Paul, who avoids, though for 
opposite reasons, Cephas and Christ, distinguishes thus : " He plants, 
Apollos waters, God gives the increase, but neither he that planteth is 
anything, nor he that watereth, but God that giveth the increase " is all 
in all. Paul speaks of himself as a co-labourer with God ; but differenti- 
ates himself and Apollos from the Corinthian Church, which he calls 
" God's husbandry." Then while he claims to have laid the foundation 
of the local church, the foundation of the universal Church no man can 
lay unless He is also its foundation " which is Jesus Christ." Man is said 
to be the temple of God, dwelt in by the Divine Spirit. On this an appeal 
is based which sums up the results of past discussions and forecasts much 
that emerges later in the epistle. What is summed up is the need of purity 
and the indwelling of God. The pure in heart shall see Him. What forecasts 
later discussions is the position that if a man defile the temple of God, 
God shall destroy him. The temple of God is Holy. He learns, too, that 



< 



REFLECTED IN IT ARE THE QUALITIES OF THE MAN 549 

stowed Upon them labour in vain";* and (7) the discus- 

all things are man's, that even Paul, Apollos, and Cephas are his, for they 
are Christ's, and Christ is God's. That is the conclusion of the whole 
matter, beyond which nothing can be said, (vi.) Chapter iv. deals with 
Paul's account of himself as an apostle and " a minister of Christ, a 
steward of the mysteries of God." As is God, such man ought to be, a 
being who subordinates all inferences not to his own reason, but to God's. 
And Paul identifies himself with Apollos in order that Corinthian men 
might set no man above the written word. Everything, even apostles, 
depend on the will of God, and Paul intends to reverse man's dependence 
on speech, and turn it into a dependence on Divine power, (vii.) The fifth 
chapter deals with a wicked man. Paul so recognizes the autonomy of 
the local church as to declare that he is present in spirit and delivers the 
man to Satan for the destruction of his flesh and the salvation of his 
spiiit. The corrupt man is charged with doing other and worse things 
than even the heathen are accustomed to boast of. Paul therefore 
exhorts them thus : '' Put away from among yourselves every such 
wicked person." He himself cannot recommend an act of discipline 
without enunciating great truths, as when he says: "Purge out the old 
leaven that ye may be a new lump " (7) ; " Christ our Passover is sacri- 
ficed for us " (8) ; " What have I to do to judge them that are without ? " ( 1 2). 
(viii.) But in the sixth chapter is discussed a question which concerns the 
man who took a brother before a heathen magistrate. He is emphatically 
condemned. The persons within the church when they went out of it 
for justice, split the church, which was Christ's. And men who are guilty of 
evil-doing, sin against that body which is a temple of the Holy Ghost, and 
which God had bought with a price. Amongst the principles here contained 
are : " The unrighteous shall not inherit the Kingdom of God " (9) ; "It 
is better to be defrauded than to defraud " (8) ; " All things are lawful unto 
me, but all things are not expedient " (12) ; " The body is for the Lord, and 
the Lord for the body" (13). 

2. The second section extends from vii. to xv. (i.) In chapter vii. there 
is begun a new theme, which concerns the relation of the sexes among the 
converted. The question is one which, considering the reputation of the 
city, could not but emerge in any local assembly, and stands related to 
one connected with the wicked person discussed in v. The question re- 
ceives here illuminative treatment, and the chapter became in later 
centuries a standard for Christian law in relation to marriage and to 
divorce. Yet, like all special subjects in the hands of Paul, general 
principles are suggested: "Every man has his proper gift of God" (7) ; 
" It is better to marry than to burn" (9); "The unbelieving husband is 
sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife by the husband" (14) ; 
" Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing," but everything 
depends on " the keeping of the commandments of God" (19); " Be not 

♦Gal. iv. II. 



550 CONTENTS AND SPIRIT OF LETTER THE 

sion of particular facts in the light of general principles. 

ye the servants of men " (23) ; " The time is short " (29) ; " Use the 
world as not abusing it " (31). (ii.) Chapter viii. touches on things offered 
unto idols, and argues that abstinence from meat offered in a heathen 
temple ought to be a conscious act. If it is knowingly eaten, it becomes an 
offence against the weak brother and an encroachment on Christian liberty. 
The chapter contains certain pregnant sayings : " Knowledge puffeth up, 
love buildeth up " (i) ; "If any man love God, the same is known of Him " 
(3) ; " An idol is nothing in the world " (4) ; " To us there is only one 
God " (6) ; " Meat commendeth us not to God " (8) ; " When ye wound 
the weak conscience of the brethren, ye sin against Christ " (12). The 
whole culminates in the writer's resolution : "I will eat no flesh while 
the world standeth, lest I make my brother to offend" (13). (iii.) Has he 
then no liberty ? This may be said to be the point discussed in ix., 
which treats of the more generous and general conception of free- 
dom. The history with which the whole chapter is filled is indeed 
Jewish, but it includes certain characteristic sayings : " As to his 
power to eat and drink" (4); "to work and forbear working" (6). 
The law had said, " Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox 
that treadeth out the corn" (9) ; " God takes care for oxen" (9) ; 
"He that ploweth plows in hope" (10); "If we have sown spiritual 
things, is it a great matter that we reap carnal things ? " (11) ; " Though 
I be free from all men, yet have I made myself servant unto all that I 
might gain some " (19) ; " They who run in a race, run all ; but only one 
receiveth the prize " (24). (iv.) In chapter x. he passes from the history 
of the Jews to historical Judaism, and argues that though God was not 
equally pleased with all, yet all were baptized unto Moses in the cloud and 
in the sea. He urges towards the close that no offence should be given 
to the Jews, to the Gentiles, nor to the church of God that the many may 
be saved, so he passes from historical Judaism to what concerned him 
most of all, the church of his own day and the conduct of the people withn 
it. Among the principles he gives utterance to are : " Flee from idolatry " 
(14) ; " I speak as to wise men, judge ye what I say" (15) ; " Do we 
provoke the Lord to jealousy ? " (22) ; " All things are lawful for me, but 
all things are not expedient " (23) ; " Ask no question for conscience 
sake " (25) ; " Why am I evil spoken of for that for which I give thanks ? " 
(30). (v.) In chapter xi., which contains an account of the Eucharist and 
of Christian worship in Corinth, he insists on the excellence of obedience, 
but does more than he set out with attempting. For he says that when the 
Christian people come together it is not for the better, but for the worse. 
Men seem to think rather of their own things, than of the things of God, 
Here he gives an account of what is termed in modern times the Eucharist 
and its celebration, and some important principles are stated : " The 
head of Christ is God " (3) ; " Judge in yourselves " (13) ; " Doth not 
even nature itself teach you ? " (14). (vi.) Chapter xii. is occupied with the 



BEST REVELATION OF PAUL AT EPHESUS 55 1 

II . 

Paul came into conflict with two features which marked 
the city: Exorcism and Religion * 

subject of spiritual gifts, which, men are urged to covet earnestly, but in 
the end he shows us " a more excellent way," Some significant texts 
may here be quoted : " There are diversities of gifts, but the same 
Spirit " ; " Differences of administration but one Lord, and diversities of 
operation, but it is one and the same God which worketh all in all " (4-6) ; 
" By one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or 
Gentiles, whether we be bond or free " (13) ; " The body is not one mem 
ber, but many (14) ; " The eye cannot say unto the hand I have no need 
of thee, nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you " (2t) ; " If 
one member of the body suffer, all the members suffer with it ; if one 
member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it " (26). 
(vii.) xiii. This is a chapter which the late Dean Stanley used to say, 
had no fellow in the Koran. Its wisdom may be thus represented : 
" Love suffereth long and is kind, love envieth not, love vaunteth not 
itself, is not puffed up " (4) ; " Love doth not fail " (8) ; " We know in 
part, and we prophesy in part " (9). It ends with " the greatest of 
these is love" (13). (viii.) Men are advised in chapter xiv. to desire 
spiritual gifts, but for a higher reason than their proud possession 
or that men may prophesy. Having defined prophecy he says, 
"Greater is he that prophesieth than he who speaketh with tongues" 
(5), and he adds that " the spirits of the prophets are subject to the pro- 
phets " (32) ; " There are many kinds of voices in the world, but none of 
them without signification " (10) ; " I will pray with the spirit, and I will 
pray with the understanding also " (15) ; "I thank my God that I speak 
with tongues more than ye all " (18) ; "I had rather speak five words 
with my understanding than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue " 
(19) ; " In understanding be not children, but in malice " (20) ; " God is 
not the author of confusion, but of peace " {^$). The chapter ends with an 
eminently Pauline verse : " Let all things be done decently and in order" (41 ). 
(ix.) Chapter xv. opens by declaring his Gospel is what he himself received, 
and is made up of three things : (i.) That Christ died for our sins ; (ii.) that 
He rose again ; and (iii.) that He did both "according to the Scriptures." 
Christ, it is argued, in His resurrection so represents as to contain all 

* Acts xix. 13-20, 23-41. Ephesus, though well described as " a city 
of change " — change is an ambiguous word — and in its intellectual 
sense as a matter of fact Ephesus changed little. It was not unstable, 
especially in religion, but a convinced worshipper of its great goddess 
while its goddess remained great and seemed powerful. 



552 EXORCISM AMONG THE JEWS. 

I . Exorcism had come very largely into the hands of the 
Jews,* in whose Synagogue Paul preached for the space of 
three months-f There, it is said, he disputed with the Jews 
and persuaded them. In the Synagogue, indeed, some were 
not persuaded, but hardened, and Paul departed from it, 
and instead he disputed daily in the school i of one Tyran- 
nus. Nor must we think of him as confining himself to 
Ephesus.§ He did not, for, as a matter of fact, **all they 
which dwelt in Asia heard the word of the Lord Jesus, whether 

mankind. Hence this corruptible must put on incorruption ; this mortal 
must be clothed with immortality, and the conclusion is reached that all 
who believe are to be steadfast and unmovable. And the phenomena 
of memorable sayings which so mark the letter here reappear : " By the 
grace of God I am what I am " (lo) ; " If Christ be not raised, ye are yet 
in your sins " {17) ; " As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be 
made alive " (22) ; " He must reign until He hath put all enemies under 
His feet" (25); " Awake to righteousness and sin not " (34); "That was 
not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural " (46) ; " Thanks be 
unto God which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ " (57), 

* It is curious that this should have been true of a race whose religion 
was the most monotheistic religion then known, but it has other elements 
than the belief in one God. There was prophecy, and the prophetic of&ce, 
which was understood in the Jewish schools as involving knowledge of 
future events. In any system, therefore, that implied such a knowledge, 
magic was quite possible, and had its own place. It is one, therefore, of 
the many things that the dogmata of our schools owes to Jewish theology, 
which we, who conceive the Hebrew prophets similarly, often forget. Yet 
no man who held office among the Jews encouraged the belief in magic, in 
exorcism, or in necromancy. It was opposed by all who held dear the 
belief in one God, who always acted according not only to his own will but 
to law. 

f Acts xix. 8. 

I He lectured in the school of Tyrannus two years (Acts xix. 9). About 
Tyrannus we know nothing, and therefore can say nothing with any 
relevance concerning either him or his school. He may have been a 
Rhetor, or a person who gave to the school its name, or a person in the 
locality of whom the school was hired. This ignorance is happily with- 
out signification. 

§ Acts xix. 10. The " Asia " of the text is not the modern continent, 
but the Roman province of which Ephesus was capital. The " Jews and 
Greeks," too, of the text is a euphemism of phrase intended to denote 
" all peoples.** 



THE SEVEN SONS OF SCEVA 553 

they were Jews or Greeks." Still, the significant thing is 
that the spirit of exorcism had entered into certain persons, 
who are here called ''vagabond Jews,"* and they took upon 
them to pronounce the name of the Lord Jesus over persons 
possessed of evil spirits, to whom they are said to have 
addressed the saying, "We adjure you by Jesus, whom 
Paul preaches, to come out of him," but the seven sons or 
disciples of Sceva,t who is described as ''chief of the priests " 
in Judaism, tried to do so with signal failure, for the evil 
spirit answered, "Jesus I know, and Paul I know, but 
who are ye?" Now it is written — the man who had 
the strength of madness "overcame and prevailed against 
them, so that they fled out of the house naked and wounded, 
and this was known to all the Jews and the Greeks who 
dwelt at Ephesus." The books which taught of curious 
arts of magic were burned before all men. They counted 
the price, and found it to be fifty thousand pieces of silver.f 
Paul, in other words, preached the word of God so "might- 
ily" that a purer life and a sweeter society were in conse- 
quence established in Ephesus. 

2. The second thing that Paul came into conflict with 
in Ephesus was religion. The religion is called that of 
Diana, but she is represented in the Anatolian faith by a 
Bee, and those who ministered unto her were named after 
the honey they distributed . The Greeks, according to their 

* The term " vagabond " occurs three times (Acts xxviii. 13, i Tim. 
V. 13, Heb. xi. 2>7) ^^ addition to this case in the New Testament, 
where it always denotes a person or thing that wanders round and round, 
aimlessly, it may be, but the essential idea is the wandering round and 
round. 

f This Sceva may have belonged to a high priestly family, but he is 
himself otherwise quite unknown. May I draw attention to the fact that 
this is no echo of Acts viii. 18-19, because there is nothing corresponding 
either to the sons, or to the number seven ? 

\ Acts xix. 19. 



554 THE NEW RELIGION AND THE OLD. 

custom, translated the animal into the man, and so changed 
the symbol into a goddess which corresponded to their own 
Artemis. They, as was natural, knew her by her Greek 
name, though she is represented to us by its Latin equiva- 
lent. Paul, by his mission, was brought into relation- 
ship with this religion, and with those who represented 
it. Yet they must be distinguished from the men called 
Asiarchs, who were among the most honourable men of 
Ephesus, and special friends of Paul. Their consciences 
did not, like that of so many of their compatriots, live in 
their pockets, nor were they most pricked when it pinched 
most severely, though as citizens of Ephesus they may 
have held their city to be compromised in the matter of 
religion. As the capital of the province called Asia, it was 
a centre whence the whole could be reached. As a class its 
citizens prided themselves equally on their knowledge of 
religion and of men, and therefore of each other. Paul, 
indeed, had so preached in the school of Tyrannus that the 
people not only were converted, but so converted as to 
become not indeed like the Jews monotheists; but they 
ceased to believe in polytheism and to buy the silver shrines 
of Diana, which they justified by saying that they knew 
better than to offer to the goddess anything she could 
neither appreciate nor desire. Men, when they found 
their craft in danger, became, in view of their threatened 
craft, extremely pious, in a sense desperately religious. 
They were so for two reasons, that silver was judged no 
longer necessary to the worship of the goddess, and, w^ith 
the silver, the workmen also became superfluous. 

3. Paul, therefore, in his own graphic words, had to fight 
"with beasts at Ephesus." * All classes of men, city mag- 
nates and magistrates, soldiers and civilians, judges and 

* I Cor. XV. 32. 



THE RIOT IN EPHESUS 555 

lawyers of all kinds, men of letters and of commerce, trades- 
men and craftsmen, all sorts and conditions of men who in 
any form entertained dislike to Paul, met in an irregular 
assembly, where he was informally tried and condemned. 
For such men judged that the last impiety was to make a 
shrine unworthy either the goddess to whom it was pre- 
sented or the man who presented it; and to be unworthy 
was to these men to be made neither of silver nor by any 
cunning workmen. Paul had come to their help as he had 
gone to Europe to help it, but they received him with suspi- 
cion and satire. The men were led by a craftsman called 
Demetrius, who had assembled his co-workers probably in 
a craft guild or meeting place. When they met in this their 
common meeting place, which was strictly guarded, they 
were quite in order, but in the theatre they became disor- 
derly, for *' the major part did not know the cause for which 
they had been called together." It was easy, therefore, to 
protest their loyalty to their local religion, which they did 
by lustily ** calling out," which they did for ''about the 
space of two hours," "Great is Diana of the Ephesians." 
Even here ''the Jews" could not be silent, but would speak 
their hatred. So Alexander was "put forward," "and 
would have made their defence," but the man who is called 
the Town Clerk rose in his place and spoke somewhat as 
follows: "There is no need to put forward any claim on 
behalf either of our religion or our goddess. To speak of 
Ephesus is to think of it and of her. We do not need to 
assert what all men know, and what all men recognize. 
What, then, are these men you so charge? They are 
neither robbers of shrines, nor are they blasphemers of 
Diana, nor are they, like the Jew Alexander, men put 
forward for racial rather than for any other reasons. If, 
then, Demetrius have a matter against them, let him act 



5S6 

as becomes a man, and plead at the bar of a law which does 
not know any difference between rich and poor, ignorant 
and wise, or Greek and Barbarian; if there is anything 
else, then over all is a properly constituted assembly, 
which is one that can be recognized and known. All are in 
danger from this day's riot, for there is no reason which 
can be found why it ought to have been ; or there is nothing 
which we can give as a reason for this meeting to those who 
have a right to know why it has been, and what may be the 
outcome of it." 

Ill 

I . After the uproar had ceased * ' Paul called unto him the 
disciples and embraced them, and departed to go into 
Macedonia." * If he went at this time he may have written 
while there the second letter to the Corinthians, which 
proves, among other things, that the Judaizing party in 
Corinth had grown bolder and more pronounced. For the 
bulk of the letter is taken up with a contrast between the 
old and the new economies, which implies a strong party 
in favour of Moses and his Law, while it also refers to his 
approaching visit to Corinth as the third .f At a second 
visit he had therefore carried out his purpose and departed. 
Then he had Judaea still in mind, J but more than Judaea 
he had the interest of his converts at heart. § The preach- 
ing of the Son of God was to him affirmative, or, to use 
his own words, it "was not yea and nay, but it was yea."|| 
Quite a number of things are said by him of a personal 
order. He refers to himself, to Silas, ^ to Timothy,** and 

* Acts XX. I. t 2 Cor. xii. 14 ; xiii. i. J 2 Cor. ix. 1-2. 

§ 2 Cor. ii. 2-5 ; viii. 22-24 .' xi. 1-2. || 2 Cor. i. 19-20. 

^ 2 Cor. i. 19. It is significant that while Timothy is, Silas is not, 
associated with him in the superscription to the letter (2 Cor. i. i). If 
Silas still lived (cf. Acts xviii. 5) this was opposed to Paul's usual custom 
and co\irtesy. Cf. i Thess. i. i and 2 Thess. i. i. 

** 2 Cor. i. I. Where the reference is to " Brother Timothy," and 19. 



WHERE HE WRITES SECOND CORINTHIANS 557 

to Titus,* and he compares the two dispensations, and the 
comparison becomes a contrast. The old is a dispensation 
of the letter, the new is of the spirit. The letter has power 
to kill; but the spirit quickeneth. The dispensation of 
death was written and graven on stone, and was as inflexible 
as the stone on which it was engraven, but the quickening 
administration of the spirit was glorious, and had a higher 
grace, as well as a greater glory. The Lord was like the 
spirit, and had a glory that excelled. Where the spirit of 
the Lord is, there is liberty; freedom from the law and 
its bondage. But liberty is more than simple freedom — 
it is to be free and yet to be bound. And all Christian 
men so fear that they are ''bond slaves of Christ." And 
great as the Gospel was, certain things were greater — 
the things of God. Paul did not feel satisfied with any- 
thing less than service of man. He felt that to live unto 
Christ was to live unto God, and he gave a wide inter- 
pretation to the act of so living. 

Hence the love of Christ, understood as His love to men 
rather than theirs to Him, is gracious as well as good; and 
Paul argued that Christian men did not need to mind 
whether they were reckoned sober or mad. His aim was to 
seek to persuade men to be reconciled to God, and when they 
were so reconciled the death of Christ did not fail of its 
effects. Man was a new creature, and to a new creation the 
whole world was renewed. Christ saw the fruit of His tra- 
vail and was satisfied; men became "the righteousness of 
God " when they lived "in Him." The cause of the super- 
session of the old economy was the existence of the new. 

2. About the same time, or very near it, Paul must also 
have written the nearest thing to a treatise that came 
from his hand. This is the Epistle to the Romans, which 

* 2 Cor. ii, 13; vii. 6, 13, 14; viii. 6, 16, 23; xii. 18. 



558 THE EPISTLES AS A TREATISE. 

is less a letter than a treatise, yet has the qualities insepa- 
rable from anything he cared to do. It is elaborate and 
deals with what lay near his heart — the proof of the 
new religion, and yet its distinction from the old. It has 
in Galatians its first outlines. It represents a two-fold 
division: (i) doctrinal, and (ii) ethical. The doctrinal 
is also historical; the ethical is practical and hortatory. 
Paul is too clear and correct a thinker to fall a victim to 
such an obvious and artificial trick of thought as division. 
In all his history there is much pure logical intellect; in 
all the creations of his intellect there is also much history. 
The two so interpenetrate that the history is but the gar- 
ment for the thought and the thought inexplicable with- 
out the history. In the doctrinal part of the Romans 
we cannot say this is historical and that theological; for 
our difficulty is due to the fact that there is no distinction 
between the two. We cannot tell where history ends and 
where theology begins. The two are so mixed that if we 
can distinguish between them the creations of the intel- 
lect and the forms of history, I would say that eight chap- 
ters are taken up with intellectual judgments, three deal 
with the history which clothes them, and another three 
with the ethics which are based on the thought and yet 
have regard to conduct. The chapters which deal with 
pure intellect are i-viii inclusive. Those concerned with 
history are ix-xi; while those which relate to conduct 
are xii-xv, also inclusive. But the distinctions are not 
involved in the position he occupied as an apostle com- 
missioned to preach the Gospel of God. To speak about 
God is to praise His character and His action, which is said 
to consist in Promise and in Law which between them 
make up the Holy Scriptures. Paul discovered the mean- 
ing of the Promise, and he distinguished it from the Law. 



DISTINCTIONS AND DIVISIONS IN ROMANS 559 

The distinction being this: that the Law was what God 
laid down as duty and imposed on men; and the Promise, 
that which had been spoken even before the Law. The 
Gospel is defined as concerning His Son Jesus Christ. To 
speak of Him is to say that He has been declared the Son of 
God in possession of power according to the Spirit of Holi- 
ness by the Resurrection and the Dead.* 



IV 

(i)t The introduction shows three things: (a) What 
Paul understood by his apostleship. The part ends in the 
salutation to the church at Rome. J (b) He explains § why 
he did not carry out his declared intention of visiting Rome. 1 1 
All he says, indeed, is that he was ''hindered hitherto, "T[ 
but he expresses his faith and recognizes his duty to com- 
municate what he himself believed to the men who 
believed with him, or as he himself says, ''that he may 
be comforted in you, each by the faith which lives in the 
other." And (c) he states by the help of a quotation 
from the Old Testament the doctrine of ' ' the righteousness 
of God by faith" as he conceived it.** This he under- 
stands as that in "the Gospel of Christ" which makes 
it "the power of God unto salvation." (ii) There is a 
continuation of the subject which grows directly out of the 
introduction :f I — the presence in all men of the light from 

* The Epistle to the Romans, which too closely resembles a treatise 
to be like a letter, has little in it that can be described as biographical. 
This remark is general, and applies to the whole epistle, which can be 
divided into either two parts or three ; in the former case chapters ix. 
to xi. are included with chapters i. to viii., in the latter case they are 
excluded. f i.-viii. J i-i7. § 8-13. 

II Acts xix. 21 ; cf. xxiii. 11 ; and Rom. xv. 24. ^ 13. 

** Rom. i. 16-17; Hab. ii. 4.. The translation is incorrect, but Paul's 
use of it is justified. tt i* 18-21. 



560 ITS EARLIER MATERIAL COMPARED WITH HIS SPEECHES. 

heaven. This Hght, which does not lead astray, needs to be 
and is explained as to source and object. The passage 
needs to be read in connection with the speech at Lystra* 
and with the address on Mars' Hill.f (iii) There exists 
no more serious and keen-sighted and often-quoted indict- 
ment of Roman morals or immorality than we have here.J 
It is descriptive, and so both historical and intellectual. 
Nothing in the Epistle to the Romans has more of history 
behind and within it, and yet more of intellect. (iv) § 
Three subjects are here discussed : (a) He turns and says to 
an imaginary objector, *'Thou art inexcusable, O man, 
whosoever thou art, who judgest." The matter of the 
judgment as well as the form or judge is specified. The 
man condemns himself who judges another, and Paul gives 
his specific reason for this, saying, *' Thou that judgest doest 
the same things," and the imaginary objector is asked cer- 
tain questions. || (/S) The questions end in reasons for an 
order in responsibility and in judgment. There is also 
drawn out in detail a parallel between the Hebrew or written 
law and the law which is unwritten, or, as Paul says, "in the 
heart," Tf whose unity with the written law is also affirmed. 
(7) The whole concludes that the work of the law is so written 
in the heart of man that his consciousness bears witness to 
its truth, because his thoughts accuse or else excuse each 
other. Wherever there is difference there must be, in 
order to agreement, discussion, and wherever there is a 
judge there is also a law.** (v)tt The mention of the 
Law brings out a preeminence of the Jew in Paul's estima- 
tion : — he could teach all mankind, in particular as regards 
what had been committed to him, God and His word. He 
therefore says, ''Thou who art called a Jew and who restest 

* Acts xiv. 14-17. t xvii. 22-31. J Rom. i. 22-32. § ii. i-t6. 

II ii. 3-11. t ii. 12-14. ** ii. 15-16. ff ii. 17-29. 



IN III WE HAVE THE KERNEL OF THE TREATISE 561 

in the law and makest thy boast of God," and "art confi- 
dent that thou thyself art a guide of the blind."* In 
what follows there is a description of circumcision, where 
is enunciated the great truth that circumcision profiteth 
if the Jew keep the whole law, but if he be a breaker instead 
of an observer of the law he becomes to God as a heathen 
man; and his circumcision is made uncircumcision. This 
involves the opposite principle : — the uncircumcised counts 
as the circumcised, and the principle becomes important 
in view of the deduction it carries : — that there is no 
"outward Jew" nor is there any circumcision in the flesh.f 
(vi) We have to note as to chapter iii (a) that one para- 
graph! begins by an account of the Jew and his preemi- 
nence in religion, and ends with proof that "Jews and 
Gentiles" ahke "are all under sin." It may be said to 
have its truth suggested by its opening question, which 
asks, "What preeminence hath the Jew, and what profit 
is there in circumcision?" To which only one answer 
is possible: "Much in every respect, but chiefly in this: 
— that unto the Jews were committed the oracles — i.e. 
the Scriptures — of God."§ (^)\\ We have here an im- 
portant paragraph, practically the kernel of the treatise, 
because it contains two main things: an account of the 
righteousness of God by faith, ^ and of the God who pro- 
vides both the righteousness and the faith.** This de- 
serves to be called "the kernel of the treatise," for the 
righteousness and the faith involve two things: (i) an 
immediate vision of God, (ii) the faith by which He can 
be reached. The (i) raises the question, "Is He the God 
of the Jews only, or of the Gentiles also ? " The (ii) raises 
the question what Jesus did, if He did not die for sin, or can 

* ii. 17-19. t ii. 25-29. J iii. i-t8. § iii. i, 2. 

II iii. 19-31- H iii- 19-25- ** iii- 27-31. 

20 



562 IDENTITY OF CHRIST WITH MAN AND WITH ADAM. 

God be related to all men unless He be righteous ? Hence 
the conclusion that by the flesh, or anything done through 
it or in it, no righteousness which He Himself directly pro- 
vides and approves can be obtained. 

2. (vii) In chapter iv Abraham is next discussed, where 
he is described as the father of many nations, who, according 
to the promise given him that his seed was to be more numer- 
ous than the grains of sand upon the seashore, believes not 
the words, but the God who spoke them. And is by this 
faith justified ? (viii) In chapter v there are two sections : 
(a)* The first section is important were it only because it is 
the transition to a new theme which was never far from the 
apostle's thoughts, the identity of Christ and of man. 
(b) The second section f has, as a consequence of what has 
gone before, an important parallel betw^een Christ and 
Adam, where is shown that God has not departed from 
His usual method in identifying the sinful man with the 
obedient Christ. He had so identified the disobedient 
Adam with the Sinless Man as to show that where he 
sinned his sin was imputed unto men. Hence as sin reigned 
through Adam unto death, so grace reigned through Christ 
unto eternal life, which is opposed to the death that came 
in consequence of Adam's sin. The righteousness of God 
has, as its consequence, life in the Spirit, as sin has its re- 
sultant in physical death. And these two are one. (ix) In 
the next chapter another question is asked : * * Shall we con- 
tinue in sin that grace may abound?"} To which Paul 
returns a negative answer, "Let it not be," and appends a 
reply, "How shall we that are dead to sin live unto God ? "§ 
(x) In the succeeding chapter we have a question of 
biographical significance. 1 1 The law teaches man the know- 
ledge of sin, yet the man who is dead to the law has in him 

* V. i-ii. t V. 12-21. t vi. I. § vi. 2. 11 vii. 7, 9-10. 



OPPOSITION OF THE CARNAL AND SPIRITUAL MAN 563 

two things, the command to obey and the love of Christ 
which occasions obedience. Hence he ' ' dehghts in the law 
of God after the inward man,"* which is the same thing as 
obedience. The law, which is outward, came in because of 
sin, and wars against the law of man's mind, which is in- 
ward .f The man is not as the law is, holy, just, and good ; J 
he loves the better, but chooses the worse. § Thus the 
law,J which makes other and happier conditions possible, 
would be his life were he to allow it; but it becomes his 
death, and he can only exclaim, *'0h, wretched man 
that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this 
death ? " 1 1 Deliverance comes, according to Paul, through 
Jesus Christ. Tf 

3. (xi) The viii chapter falls into two divisions: (a)** 
The opposition of the carnal to the spiritual mind, which is 
love and peace, is emphasized, but only that the spirit 
may be exhibited as warring against the flesh .ff The 
man who is spiritual is bound as an "heir of God and joint- 
heir with Christ" to live according to the spirit ;JJ and 
this spirit is exhibited in nature and in man as waiting * ' for 
the manifestation of the sons of God" which brings them 
into a ''glorious liberty." §§ Nature may suffer with man, 
but it so suffers only to share his renewal. The will of 
God so penetrates all things and persons that wherever it 
is, in nature as in man, there must be improvement, which 
means a second birth. (/3) 1 1 1 1 The whole previous section 
may be said to culminate in his account of the will of God. 
"All things work together for good to them that love Him." 
Paul then gives his version of the divine purpose, which 
relates to those God called — the foreknown or predes- 



* vii. 22. 


t vii. 23. 


J vii. 12. § vii. 15-17. 


11 vii. 24. 


H viii. 25. 


** viii, 1-27. tt viii. i-io. 


JJ viii. 


11-17. §§ viii. 


J8-23. 11 11 viii. 28-39. 



564 GOD GREATER THAN HISTORY; HIS SOVEREIGNTY. 

tinated are to be — eternity is to God an eternal now — 
"conformed to the image of His Son, in order that He 
might be the first-born among many brethren,"* as He 
with His redeemed around Him form together a family to 
God. Then the purpose to which Paul had throughout 
addressed himself is stated if *'He who spared not His 
own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not 
with Him also freely give us all things ? " From that to the 
end alike of the chapter and section there is a paragraph, — 
one of the most eloquent in the letters of Paul, — which deals 
with the highest of all things, the interpretation of God, in 
which the will of God means the Pauline doctrine of grace. 



I . In the three chapters that follow there is a theory of 
God's action in history or His sovereignty which can be 
explained only as one holds God to be what He is, gov- 
erned by the laws of His own being. The (i) section J 
which is concerned with history discusses subjects which 
may be divided thus : (a) The introduction § is transitional : 
• — the survey of Christian privileges fills "the eye and 
prospect of" the writer's soul, which yet is full of regret for 
the excluded — a grief the apostle finds it the harder to bear 
that the excluded are his own "kinsmen" who had in past 
times received many tokens of the divine favour, which 
began with their very name and ends only with the descent 
of the Messiah, (b) But neither the promises nor God Him- 
self were so fused with the people as to be inseparable from 
Israel. The privileges were but temporal, and the election 

* viii. 28-30. t viii. 32. 

X The ix is a famous chapter, were it only because of theological differences 
which have divided exegetes. § ix. 1-5. 



RELATION OF PAULINE ETHICS TO THEOLOGY 565 

signified no more than the opposite process, the reproba- 
tion, whether of Esau or of Pharaoh.'^' (c) Evidence follows 
from Old Testament prophets, like Hosea and Isaiah, as 
well as from the nature both of righteousness and the law, 
that Israel could not attain, by an obedience which was but 
partial, the things promised to a faith which was universal .f 
(ii) The section which follows falls into two parts, which 
discuss (a) the meaning of **the righteousness of faith" 
to which Israel would not submit, and the consequent 
equality established between Jew and Greek; J and (b) a 
faith which leans on the preacher, as the preacher on the 
people by whom he is sent.§ (iii) The following chapter 
discusses three subjects : (a) the relation of God to Israel ; 1 1 
(b) the relation of Israel to man;Tf and (c) the relation 
of God to mankind;** ''God shut up all together in un- 
belief that He might have mercy upon all. "If This sec- 
tion concludes as in all Paul's great epistles with a doxol- 
ogy touching "the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom 
and the knowledge of God."JJ It ends thus: "Of Him, 
through Him, and to Him are all things, to Him be glory for 
ever, Amen."§§ 

2. There is also formulated a practical purpose, and 
there is in consequence much exhortation to realize it. The 
section 1 1 j | is occupied with ethics, (i) One never reads Paul 
without a sense of his fitness for his office, which represented 
God among men. Whether the things concern man's beliefs 
or conduct, he speaks always as a man appointed of God, and 
as a person whose place is worthily gained. His system of 
ethics is formed indeed out of his theology; but his the- 
ology is strictly natural. The Creator is to him the maker 

* ix. 6-23. t ix. 24-33. t X. 1-12. § X. 13-21. 

II xi. i-io. ^ xi. 11-20. ** xi. 21-31. ft xi. 32. 

tt xi. 33' §§ xi. 36. II 11 It extends from xii to xv. 



566 

of all we see, and his ethics and his theology are, as em- 
bedded in nature, alike natural, (ii) The relation between 
the theology and the ethics becomes apparent by the 
very opening of the section, where men are besought to 
present themselves unto God as a living sacrifice * Men 
are required to think of themselves ''according to the 
measure of faith," and instead of looking back to look 
before, and Paul explains what he means. He refers to 
mankind as a whole, and the new man is meant to be 
*'in Christ" and, as he says, ''every one members one of 
another." On this basis a system of ethics is built as new 
as his theology, (iii) In the xii and xiii chapters a principle 
is implied which takes for granted man's reason and his 
being in a political system, which, as well as man's place 
in it, has been determined by the will of God, who also 
has fixed man's destiny. And Paul expresses his belief 
that "love is the fulfiUing of the law."t (iv) In the 
chapters that follow he explains the weakness of "the 
weak brother," and exhorts the "strong to bear the 
infirmities of the weak. "J It is the duty of the Christian 
man to "please his neighbour for his good." The treatise 
ends in a doxology : — "the God of peace be with you all." 
These are the final words in a treatise which contains more 
thought than even Paul was in the habit of communicating. 

VI 

I . The range and the materials of Christian thought and 
its consequent system of obligation stand embodied in the 
treatise which has just been described, and I know noth- 
ing that states more clearly what a Christian man ought 
to beheve, to be, and to do. We may think, though it 

* xii. I. t xiii. lo. | xiv. i ; xv. i. 



I 



GALLIO'S JUDGMENT ON THE TREATISE 567 

is a curious thing even to imagine it as a possibility, that 
the letter may have fallen, on its way to Rome, into the 
hands of Gallio. Yet, especially if we consider the position 
he occupied, there is nothing to surprise us in it so falling. 
He had, like his own brother, the philosopher Seneca, 
literary ambition which in Achaia, with clever and intellect- 
ual Greeks all round him, he had every opportunity for 
indulging. He opens, therefore, the letter which, as it 
were by accident, has fallen into his hands, and reads it. 
He knew the Romans, and he felt their scorn for the con- 
quered, whether clever or the opposite. The fact that a 
man has been conquered, makes him even to his con- 
queror hardly a man. And Gallio had this feeling to the 
Jew. But we have imagined this Pauline letter *'to the 
Romans" as having chanced to come into his hands, 
and we can therefore overhear comments which he utters 
on the opened letter. "Paul?" he says, "that was the 
little 'blear-eyed' Jew-man they brought before my judg- 
ment-seat, against whom I would not hear any charge, and 
I was a wise man for it. For this Paul was a man that had in 
his thinking clearly defined the difference between a religion 
protected by the State, and the State which protected the 
religion. I am not now, as I was not then, prepared to 
recognize the teaching of religion as the function of the 
State." But he reads on: "Paul a servant of Jesus Christ." 
"Jesus Christ?" Why, who is that? He must be the 
person whom I have heard my friend, Pontius Pilate, talk 
about — a man whom the obstinate, credulous Jews perse- 
cuted unto death by pestering Pilate into crucifying. And 
after they had caused him to be crucified at Jerusalem, 
here is this Paul addressing him as the Son of God, 
which is, to say the least, unusual on the lips of a Jew, who 
is a man that believes in one God. I would like to have 



568 PROBLEMS WHICH PAUL SUGGESTS TO GALLIO. 

heard my brother Seneca, though he was younger than 
myself, speak on the extravagances of the human mind 
in the matter of belief, for they are past comprehension 
by me. Even this Paul confesses himself an apostle 
— i.e. a man sent out and delegated by him who 
sends him, — of the Son of the Most High God." But 
he reads on and finds that Paul speaks of himself as 
"debtor, both to the Greek and to the Barbarian, to 
the ignorant and to the wise," and Gallio adds, "If any 
man imagines he can catch Paul napping, then he is 
a most enviable person and one qualified to teach himself 
what to do and what to think about the case." He reads 
on, and finds that the righteousness of God is called in this 
letter "to the Romans" good news; and the introduction 
ended, its author comes to a description of the Roman 
world: its sin, its vice, its passion, its bestial lust. And 
Gallio says, "This man, at least, has in him an eye which 
can see, and which looks straight into the sins of our time." 
Then Gallio continues to read till Paul comes to speak about 
a law of God in the heart. ' ' Why, ' ' he says to himself, ' ' my 
brother, philosopher though he is, never said anything as 
true as this. A law in the heart? it accuses, perfectly 
right, Paul, and it excuses, perfectly right still, and this 
accusing and excusing proves that we have moral standards 
of judgment. Right," saith Gallio, "there is such a source 
of obligation which proves Jew and Greek to have moral 
standards of judgment. The man who can teach this has 
much to say that the Greek ought to hear, and the Latin 
as well." But Gallio reads on. He reads of " the righteous- 
ness of God," of a God who is righteous, "of Grace," and 
the God who is gracious; of man, who is altogether evil, 
incorporated in one head named Adam, who lives according 
to the flesh: but his works are undone in another Head, 



THE EGOTISM OF VANITY AND OF VOCATION 569 

named Christ, who lives according to the spirit, and he says : 
"Thou art right here also, O Paul, judged according to this 
standard, for all men are either in the Adam when they act 
according to the flesh, or in the Christ when they act accord- 
ing to the spirit." On this marvellous letter, therefore, 
Gallio moralizes thus: "Why, I never did a greater or 
better day's work in my life than when I refused to im- 
prison Paul or even to keep him in bonds, preferring that he 
should be free." The man who may have said so much 
for Paul and his belief in him deserved better of the church 
than to be made a type of those who care for "none of 
these things." 

2. Paul has lived ever since in spirit, transforming men 
into vehicles of Christian thought, and Christian belief, and 
Christian character, massing them together so as to form 
a Christian society, making the whole history of mankind 
everywhere an expression of the infinite will of God. There 
is a great difference between the egotism of vocation and 
the egotism of vanity. Many men are possessed of the 
egotism of vanity, for it makes a man intensely self- 
important and communicative, especially in trivialities, 
like questions of dress, as when he says, ''I saw yester- 
day a gentleman, who was dressed in a given way; and 
he said to me so-and-so." The questions that the egotism 
of vanity loves to discuss are: "The way in which I bore 
myself in a certain society, and the way in which the society 
bore itself to me." It is small and common; but the ego- 
tism of vocation is neither small nor common. It does not 
know an ego, but loses itself in God ; it simply makes self into 
a vehicle or vessel for God, and there is no being for it other 
than His will. Paul had no single element of the egotism 
of vanity, though he had a large share of the egotism of 
vocation. 



570 PAUL'S LONGING TO WORSHIP AT JERUSALEM. 



VII 

I . But in the late days of his life, worn out and weary, 
Paul took a great longing to go back to Jerusalem and join 
in the worship of his fathers' God. I know the longing, and 
have experienced it, having lived much from home. In 
the fiords of Norway I have lain and yearned, with a con- 
suming desire, for the long bare ridge of the Lammermoors, 
and for its bent grass which waves in the wind. I have 
stood, too, by Niagara, but I could not hear the roar of its 
mighty waters or see the beauty of their colour for thoughts 
of the silvery Tweed. I have lived under the shadow of the 
Himalayas, and have looked on our highest mountain 
range, whose glories I have been quite unfit to see because 
the sound of the voice I first knew and most loved was in 
my ears. I have sung with many an ancient person the 
Psalms of my people — 

In Judah's land God is well known, 
His name in Israel's great; 
In Salem is His tabernacle, 
In Zion is His seat. 

Yes, I have loved the Psalms the people sang, because I 
have loved the people that sing the Psalms, and know by 
personal experience how a man feels who loves to worship 
with his kin. In his age and feebleness, battered and 
spent, driven by inexorable longing up to Jerusalem to 
dwell among his own kin, Paul would worship the God 
of his fathers upon the hill of Zion, which was to him a 
mount of vision. How then did he go? Did Ephesus 
attract him? He might be accompanied by many men: 
Sopater from Beroea,* or Aristarchus and Secundus from 

* Acts XX. 4; cf. Rom, xvi. 21. 



LOVE OF HOMELAND AND OF EPHESUS 571 

Thessalonica * Gaius from Derbe,t Timotheus from Lystra,f 
Tychicus and Trophimus from the province of Asia;§ 
but converts could not satisfy a man moved by love of 
home. He sailed away from Philippi, whence he came 
unto Troas, from which he first visited the land of Europe, 
and where came to him the dream which was the vision of 
his life. But Ephesus could not detain him, and therefore 
he did not spend the time on land, but ''he hasted if it 
were possible for him to be at Jerusalem by Pentecost." || 
But while he could not call at Ephesus, he went as near it 
as was possible, and ' ' sent and called the elders of the church 
there to Miletus."^ He sailed past it, therefore, and 
reached Tyre, where disciples met him, and said that he 
should not go amongst his own people.** Wives and chil- 
dren might together bring him on hisway, but whilst all knelt 
down on the shore and prayed , the hour came of leave-taking. 
Time and tide will wait for no man, and so they of Paul's 
company took ship, and wives and children returned to their 
homes again. But from Tyre they went to Caesarea, where, 
in the house of Philip the Evangelist, whose daughters were 
prophetesses, we read that ''a certain prophet named 
Agabus"tt came from Jerusalem and said, ''You will be 
bound in bonds, therefore stay your feet, and let them not 
move towards Jerusalem; do not seek to stand within it." 
And the prophet in so saying said but what he knew. 

2. A man who loves men cannot understand or appreciate 
their hate. A man of large enthusiasm cannot know a 
narrower man, a fanatic who measures everything by a sect 
or a tribe. Paul, who carried with him his treasured collec- 



* Acts XX. 4. t Acts XX. 4 ; cf. i Cor. i, 14 ; Rom. xvi. 23. 

J Acts xvi. 1-3. § Acts XX. 4. 

II Acts XX. 16. ^ Acts XX. 17. 

** Acts xxi. 4. ft Acts xxi. 10 ; cf. Acts xi. 27-28. 



572 JAMES THE RESPECTABLE AND PAUL THE SUSPECTED, 

tion,* and did not know what he went to, passed on his way 
and in amongst his own people. And what did the people 
do to him ? He was the greatest of missionaries, the man 
called of God to Europe, who returned from Europe, which 
he had unified by means of a religion, with it as his field and 
his fee. And James met him. Now who was James ? He is 
called ''the brother of the Lord."t He lived face to face 
with the Lord for years, but he never knew Him as his Lord 
and Saviour. He remained an inmate of the same house, yet 
he did not become either a disciple or an apostle. This man, 
then, though he never knew the Lord while He lived, has 
yet his place in His church, in which he holds high office by 
virtue of his kinship. No doubt he had undergone his 
measure of conversion, but conversion differs according to 
the nature of the converted, and this man's nature was not 
roomy enough to allow him to change his mind; but in 
spite of everything he yet stands honoured by all at the head 
of the local church in Jerusalem. This is the man Paul met ; 
and we have but to think of their meeting to see how unlike 
the men are. James is the head of a comfortable society, a 
respected man, a man enshrined in respectability, with re- 
spectable men about him. He holds the law in honour, 
and is honoured by the persons who obey it. And Paul, 
worn, emaciated, with the burden of labour upon him, and 
equally the burden of years — he has proved himself a great 
minister of God, who had done much to make God respected 
even by men who did not respect Him. 

3. Now, does James fall before this Paul and say: "I 
am not worthy to loose your very shoe latchets. 
You have made the name of our Master illustrious 
where men live, while I have been staying at home 
making my own good name, which I have loved, 

* I Cor. xvi, 1-4. I Gal. i. 19. 



THE HERETICAL AND THE ORTHODOX COMPARED 573 

neglecting much meanwhile"? Does he say anything 
approaching that ? No, not he ; nor does he say anything 
like it. Instead he says, ''You are a suspected man, and 
you must purge yourself of the suspicion in which you are 
justly held." For every man gets his deserts. He held, 
therefore, as a self-evident truth that a suspected man is 
a man worthy of suspicion. And in the present case he 
takes a practical step to erase suspicion from minds which 
doubted this preeminently orthodox person, whom they 
yet assumed to be heterodox. And he was as heretical as 
he seemed. He said, therefore: ''No man can prevent 
the people meeting when they hear you have come. But 
take four men who have a vow on them, purify yourself 
with them, shave your head, and make all men know 
that their suspicions are vain and due solely to mis- 
information. Go with these men into the temple, and show 
by your action that you walk orderly, and that you and 
your Gentiles respect the law as I have decreed." It 
mattered not that Paul came back to Jerusalem with 
Christianity planted in the Greek mind, and the Greek mind 
wedded to its wide and universal truths; with the new 
religion planted in commerce, to grow with it, to purify it, to 
use it as its own great instrument. He may have replied : 
" So be it ; if my mind, my words, my service, my character, 
the years of work in the Christian religion, do not satisfy 
men as they have satisfied God, then I will do as you bid ; I 
will go burn the hair that I have shaven off my head that it 
may erase the suspicion which men entertain of me." Now, 
which man is the nobler ? The man who thought that the 
suspicion of his people condemned the suspected, or the 
suspected man who went in bravely to do the little thing 
required of him, though the little thing sorely troubled his 
conscience? While there is no evidence that Paul either 



574 THE JEWS OF JERUSALEM AND THE MEN 

loved to do the thing or loved the thing he did, he still did 
it in order that he might carry out his own principle, which 
bade him do nothing that would cause his weak brother to 
offend. It was a useless step to try to conciliate the men 
of Israel, and none knew its uselessness so well as he. He 
was charged with bringing into the temple the polluting 
presence of Greeks. And they bound him with chains. 
So "the Jews of Jerusalem " behaved very much as the men 
of Ephesus behaved, when some cried one thing, and some 
another. 

Paul never scrupled to confess himself a Jew, though 
he claimed to be ''a citizen of no mean city,"* and 
he addressed the people in Aramaic, which was then the 
common speech in Palestine.! They heard so much of his 
speech, but when it became a recital of his conversion and 
what followed thereon they said, "Away with such a one 
from the earth; it is not fit that he should live. "J They 
bound Paul .with thongs, and he said to the centurion, '*Is 
it lawful for you to scourge a man that is a Roman?" 
because as untried he was uncondemned.§ The centurion 
heard the saying, and was awed by it. Seeking "the chief 
captain," he told him, "Take heed what thou doest, for 
this man is a Roman"; and he made answer to the in- 
criminated man, "With a great sum did I obtain this 
freedom." Paul simply replied, "I was free born."|| 

I do not know that it is possible to say more touching 
his imprisonment and later career than is done by the 
author of the Acts. He moves most freely where the scene 
allows his Greek spirit free course, which has freest play in 
the closing scenes, and where Felix, Festus, King Agrippa, 
are, as officials of Rome, well known in history. They are, 

* Acts xxi. 39. t xxi. 40. J xxii. 22. 

§ xxii. 25. II xxii. 26-28. 



OF EPHESUS; PAUL IN PRISON 575 

too, the kind of men a writer who was writing fiction rather 
than fact would most avoid. If the author of the narrative 
which we name "The Acts of the Apostles" has as the true 
cause of his speech the Greek spirit, we can readily explain 
the appearance of names of Roman officials in his narrative. 
But it is not possible that another man should so write. 
We learn enough when it is said that Paul was conveyed 
from Jerusalem to Csesarea, and thence to Rome, where it 
is said he dwelt two whole years in his own hired house, and 
received all who came in unto him * To this period belong 
the epistles that are known as "epistles of the captivity"; 
Colossians, Ephesians, Philemon, and Philippians. 

(i) Of these Philippians seems to me to be the earlier, inas- 
much as it looks back as well as before. Amongst its back 
references some refer not only to Philippi, but to the ideas 
expounded in the greater epistles. Amongst the references 
to Philippi must be reckoned his knowledge of the persons 
about to receive the epistle,t the men who preached now 
in truth and now in pretence, his brethren in the Lord, 
and their conversation, Timothy,! and the mission of 
Epaphroditus.§ The references to their and his past show 
that he has not in any respect forgotten their goodness 
to himself, II and their belief in his teaching as regards 
righteousness and law and faith. ^f 

There is also reference to the future which seems most 
evident.** 

(ii) Ephesians, which has been disallowed as an epistle 
of Paul, as far as I can see without reason or warrant. 
There is reason why Tychicus only should be alluded 
to, and also why the doctrine of the church should 

* Acts xxviii. 30; cf. 16. f Phil. i. ;^-6, 15-19; ii. 15. 

f ii. 19. § ii. 25; iii. 18. || iii. 2-6. 

^ iii. 8-10. ** iv. 8. 



576 "PAUL THE aged" DOES NOT CEASE TO LOVE CHURCHES. 

be less local and more developed than in any of Paul's 
earlier epistles. 

(iii) Colossians has also to be taken into account, and 
with it falls or stands Philemon, which is a fine example of 
courtesy amid difficulties. It has to do with a runaway 
slave termed Onesimus, and at the same time with Paul, 
who calls himself "Paul the aged," though he w^as not an 
old man according to our reckoning. 

What Paul termed specifically his ''Gospel" need not 
here be discussed. His great contribution to thought was 
a doctrine of the Divine will, construed as the love of Deity 
to man. The idea of grace was as essentially Pauline as 
that of love was essentially Johannine; the one took His 
"love" as an attribute of will, the other took it as an 
attribute of heart. But the will of Paul was as broad as 
the heart of John; and the will as more reasonable was 
more rational than the heart, and also more prepared to 
accept obedience as inner and not simply sensuous and 
outer. 



X 

JOHN THE APOSTLE 

I 

I. TOHN the Apostle has already been described * The 
J sketch, indeed, was based avowedly and almost 
solely upon the information supplied in the Synoptic 
Gospels, and was not prejudiced in favour of the tra- 
ditional view. 

There must in consequence be an attempt to outline the 
John of tradition and of theology, and we can best begin 
with a comparison between the two great writers whose 
personalities are reflected in the New Testament, Paul and 
John. This has the double advantage of combining (a) the 
present with the previous ''study," and (j3) two persons 
who in literature stand together in a preeminence too 
friendly to admit of rivalry, yet too complementary to 
permit of independence. For each in his own order is 
supreme, but the two orders are altogether different. To 
me there are times when Paul seems the greater, but these 
are followed by other times when the greatness belongs 
rather to John. Yet between the men the categories of IcvSS 
and of greater have no place. They differ in kind rather 
than in degree; but where the qualities are not the same, 
comparison may yet illustrate differences of feature rather 
than of scale, whether of moral excellence or defect. 

* Supra, pp. 302-4. 
2P 577 



578 PAUL AND JOHN IN THEIR EPISTLES AND HISTORIES; 

2. If we take the literature that bears their respective 
names, then, we find that Paul's letters are full of a 
personality active, indefatigable, intellectual, critical, 
strenuous, resolute, aggressive. Man could not quench the 
energy within him, nor could the majesty of human author- 
ity overawe him ; he must write as he must speak, travel, 
evangelize, and teach. He fears no one, spares no one. 
The rebuke leaps with evil speed to pen or tongue; and 
the suddenness is equally true of the benediction. He 
recognizes no responsibility to any man or body of 
men, only to Christ, who directly made him an apostle. 
And of himself see how much can be known out of 
his writings ; — we know of his stature, of his appearance, 
of how his appearance was judged, of his speech, of the 
stripes he received, the imprisonmnent he had suffered, the 
shipwrecks he had endured, the journeys he had under- 
taken, the men he had met, and the churches he had 
founded.* We know the men that troubled and the men 
that edified, the questions, the parties and policies of his 
time; what was the gospel he preached, and what was pro- 
posed as a substitute. We know, too, the internal disci- 
pline, and the external relations of the churches: how Jew 
dilTered from Gentile, and Gentile from Jew, how together 
they recognized a common calling, and had a common 
sanctity with the saints of Greece, who yet rejoiced to help 
the poor saints at Jerusalem. Paul can be known from 
his own letters, though he speaks as one who does not mean 
his personality to stand out prominently, or to be singular in 
any respect ; but he writes simply, and all the more that it is 
without conscious design the writing expresses his character. 

* If we would know how much concerning Paul can be gathered from his 
letters, we have but to consult 2 Cor. xi; Phil. iii. 1-7; and Rom. i, 8-t6; 
ix. 1-5. 



IMPERSONALITY OF JOHN; PERSONALITY OF PAUL 579 

3. Now in the epistles and in the gospel we owe to John 
there is nothing similar; indeed there emerges an entirely 
different character, a man totally unlike Paul. We hear 
his voice, but do not see either the speaker or the 
persons addressed. We do not know for certain when or 
how he lived, whether his mother-speech was or w^as not 
some form of Aramaic; what friends he had, what labours 
he endured, what sufferings or what persecutions he under- 
went. All seems impersonal, though within that very im- 
personality there appears the most subtly and delicately 
etched character. He is simply in the background, but 
the person he means to represent stands in the front, and 
fills all the scene. Paul so writes his thoughts as to write 
history, while John so wrote history as to write his thoughts. 
The history of Paul is a kind of impersonation of will, and 
at his power we marv^el much. John finds in the history of 
Christ his impersonation; the meaning of the Master is 
nowhere more comprehensively stated than by the disciple 
whom He loved, and who so saw Him that He compelled 
after ages to see as he did, to believe as he believed, and to 
live possessed of the passion to love as he loved. 



II 

I . This comparison with Paul compels us to put alongside 
it another, which may be a comparison with Peter. Here, 
too, tradition must be followed; but the Petrine tradi- 
tion does not see what John sees. Had he so seen, Peter 
could not have resisted writing as to the character of Him 
he served and loved. He is happier as a companion to 
John than even Paul and Timothy, for he stands beside him 
in evangelical history. The two men rise together into 
fame, and they never ceased to be like each other. Both 



580 PETER AND JOHN MORE LIKE: THEY STAND TOGETHER 

were fishermen, and both had to work for their living; 
but while John rose to a higher level of being, Peter re- 
mained what he had been — a worker, with the mind of a 
workman — slow of thought, though swift of speech, med- 
dlesome yet irrepressible, ready to question and to rebuke 
the Master. But John, intense in thought, though re- 
strained in speech, — silent, reflective, meditative, intui- 
tive, — holds what he looks at before the eye of his soul till he 
has absorbed it into his soul's substance. And so, when his 
object is Jesus, he becomes love from looking at love. 

And then observe how love holds him like a spell, defining 
with almost the rigour of physical law the orbit within which 
he moves. Peter, at the arrest in Gethsemane, having re- 
lieved his feeling by executing vengeance on the servant of 
the high priest, follows Jesus ; but only to be tempted, at the 
moment when confidence and confession were most needed, 
into despondency and denial. Yet even then he who had 
never protested his faithfulness stood by the power of his 
love. When the disciples who had followed had fled, John, 
faithful unto death, and obedient through love, stood 
among the women at the cross. There he received from 
the Master the charge of His mother, and he took the 
mother to his own home. And in the home he still re- 
flected on the Son, and, through much meditation on 
His love for His mother and the mother's love for her Son, 
he came to know the eternal in the Son and the essential 
in the Father who sent Him. 

2. And when the day of work had come and the apostles 
had become evangelists, Peter stood out as the preacher and 
the founder of churches, ever flaming, as it seemed, on the 
forefront of the morning sky; while John, in all the active 
and actual things of the church, stood behind Peter, and in 
his shadow, like one who hardly felt the world to be real, 



IN THE EVANGELICAL AND APOSTOLICAL HISTORIES 58 1 

and who found his only reaUty in the history that lay behind 
him and in the visions that floated before. He could not 
part with the history, for was it not the record of his real 
experience with the Christ who dwelt in his heart and on 
whose bosom he had leaned ? Yet the history that lived to 
memory gave form and substance to hope, for he wedded the 
Jesus that had been to the heaven that was to be. If eter- 
nity was to be as the moment when he leaned on the Mas- 
ter's breast at supper, then only a moment could eternity be. 
And so the heaven before was peopled and realized and de- 
fined into real and bodily being by the history which w^as 
behind. And thus there came to stand before him in clear 
and holy vision a moment of human existence which, while 
it floated between the eternal past and the eternal future, 
yet held within it all the issues of the one and all the promise 
of the other. And so we may say that out of holy love came 
quiet meditation, and out of meditation and love came the 
History which showed (i) the only-begotten Son as He, in 
one and the same act, revealed the invisible Father and 
redeemed the world, and (ii) the Book which we name the 
Apocalypse, and which, underneath all its visions and 
mysteries, has ever been showing to the church at once 
the drama of time and the beatitude of eternity. 



HI 

I. The Master had need of John, as well as John of the 
Master. The John Jesus made He needed, and the making 
was a confession of the need. It may seem extraordinary 
and even extravagant to speak of the Saviour of the world 
as standing in need of any person, least of all of a man as 
His special and peculiar friend, but the need was real and 
two-fold : (a) as a friend, (b) as interpreter. The two are 



582 JESUS NEEDS JOHN AS FRIEND; 

SO related that he could be interpreter only as he was friend. 
As friend he loved and therefore needed a person he could 
love. And Jesus knew that John with all his human frailties 
was as frail as His hands were strong. So at His touch 
the narrow heart broadens out into the home of a holy and 
of a divine benevolence. The Christ so loved as to breathe 
His own love into John, and with it came life. He held 
him fascinated till he absorbed His very spirit, and was 
assimilated to His image. In these gracious hands the 
man was so held as to be re-formed or made a new creature ; 
and we can see the w^ondrous charm of the Maker working 
upon him, making him silent, contemplative, imitative. 

2 . Can a friendless life even to the Perfect be humanly real 
yet a really historical life ? Without a personal and close 
friendship could Jesus be said to have known man? He 
knew, indeed, man's hate: He tasted his fickleness, his 
treachery, his enmity, though disguised now as patronage 
and now as jealousy for order or love of law. And He knew 
the fury of the sin that became at the sight of holiness 
a passion to stain and to tarnish. Hate waited for His 
coming into the world, and gathered round Him even 
at the threshold of His ministry. It grew as grows 
the thundercloud in the face of the sun, hiding the glory 
it cannot extinguish. It closed round Him at His death, 
which it dipped, as it were, " in the hues of earthquake and 
eclipse." There was no need to cultivate or to direct the 
forces of sin, which came unbidden and acted according 
to their nature and as they listed. But human love was 
too shy and tender a thing to come unbidden. It had to 
be created, cultivated, won. Yet without human love how 
could Jesus have known humanity, or experienced all that 
man can be and ought to be to man ? 

Without a special friendship how could His strength have 



QUALITIES IN FRIEND AND INTERPRETER 583 

ever known the transcendent joy of feeling round it the 
clinging arms of a trustfulness that will not let it go ? Do 
not all remember that wondrous prophetic word : ' * A little 
child shall lead them"? In a tale, which is well within 
the memory of all, were it only for its rare and deli- 
cate truthfulness, we read of a man into whose lowly 
life treachery and villainy had come so as to sour his 
simple piety and to turn him into a sordid hater of his 
kind. Where love of man had been there came love of 
gold; and he gathered it and hoarded it, and gloated 
over his hoard.' One day, as he went to his usual shrine 
to worship, he found the gold gone, and in its place there 
had come a little helpless child. And round the heart 
of him a new love, rooted in the innocence and trust- 
fulness of the child, grew and clustered, and the new 
object made the new love finer, gentler, stronger than 
the old: it held him: it softened him: it filled him 
with the milk of human kindness. It was the little 
child leading the sordid hater of his kind back into a 
new and generous manhood. And so we may say of Jesus, 
that He knew in the might of His own experience what it 
was to redeem man, to see visibly before Him what it was to 
be redeemed, and to live with the man He peculiarly loved, 
and found peculiarly loving. What, indeed, was the beloved 
disciple but a form under which the Redeemer experienced 
on earth the glory^ which He should taste with the redeemed 
in heaven ? And may we not say, then, that through this 
peculiar friendship, Jesus, even in the hour of His passion, 
knew and realized ** the joy that was set before Him " ? 

3. And this friendship was the condition of interpreta- 
tion. And surely, for His function and mission in the 
world, a true interpreter was what Jesus needed most of 
all. Now, who can interpret love better than the loved ? 



584 JOHN INTERPRETS CHRIST AS REGARDS 

And it is exactly this quality which distinguishes the inter- 
pretation of John. He is most truly called John the Divine, 
for he was made the Divine, preeminent as such among the 
apostles, by his heart. Now, his interpretation regarded 
three provinces, the eternal past behind him, and the eternal 
future before him, and the moment of history which floated, 
as it were, between. 

(i) That eternal past he changed from a vacant abstrac- 
tion into the life of a God whose nature is love. We do not 
think of God in the manner of Isaiah, simply as the lofty 
One who inhabiteth eternity, or, like the Jewish psalmist, 
as Him from whose besetting presence we cannot flee. We 
do not, when the heart is smitten, think of Him, to speak in 
the language of the schools, as the Infinite or the Absolute 
or the Unknown ; rather we forget the Creator and think of 
the God we have learned to know from John, the God whose 
name is Father and whose being is Love. 

(ii) Then there is the eternal future. John saw it in 
apocalyptic visions, and it was very different from the 
past which he had conceived. When he looked through 
Christ at the past he saw that in the beginning there 
was God, and that God was not alone, for even then 
He was Father. And to be the Father He could not 
be without the Son. All that past is summed up and repre- 
sented to him by the idea of a God who ever lives and loves. 
But when he turns to the future, the vision he has is of 
this same God as the Centre of a celestial society. Eternity 
has, as it were, blossomed into heaven, which differs from 
eternity thus : eternity has none but God in it ; but heaven 
has God and man, though man turned into a society of the 
good and the holy. Heaven, therefore, is but the memory 
of the history that lies behind turned into a dream of the 
infinite beatitude that is before. In this heaven there is 



PAST AND FUTURE AND PRESENT 585 

a Lamb upon the throne — and round it are the spirits of 
just men made perfect, who constitute a society whose Hfe 
is even as the Hfe of God, one of immortal love. 

(iii) And between these two eternities stands the mo- 
ment of human history which is summed up in Christ, the 
Incarnate Son, the Fruit of the Eternal Love, the Pledge 
and Promise of final beatitude. And consider how he 
conceives this Christ of history. Think how hard the 
problem he had to solve, viz. to write a human history 
which was yet truly divine, to describe how the Word be- 
came flesh, and dwelt among us, and yet was bone of our 
bone, flesh of our flesh, and spirit of our spirit. He had 
to wed the most miraculous of all ideas to the most real 
and simple of all histories. 

IV 

I. And this transcendent task, — soberly considered, it 
was a far harder task than was essayed by Paul in the 
Letters that attempted the interpretation of Christ's 
person and significance, — was performed by a man. 
Leave it to one who had not known and loved the historical 
Jesus, and the person would have been abnormal, an 
awful and impossible monstrosity, with His humanity, 
even as some later theologies conceived it, abolished by 
the Deity, or, at best, reduced to the semblance of a dream. 
But in John's Gospel, even more than in any other we pos- 
sess, the beautiful humanity is retained. To him we owe 
the finely touched interview with Nathanael ; the wedding 
at Cana of Galilee, with the significant contributions of Jesus 
to its simple human gladness. Then he shows Him, not 
standing upon His recognized dignity even as a Rabbi, 
but graciously receiving a shy and shamed visitor by 
night; and soon after we find Him sitting, wearied, by 



586 CHARACTERISTICS OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 

Jacob's well, speaking to the Samaritan woman, and mak- 
ing her at once penitent and happy by His speech. His, 
too, is the beautiful idyll of the sisters, Martha and Mary, 
their love to each other and to their brother, and their 
different but equally real love to Him ; He moves through 
their sorrow like a healing Spirit, comforting by the sym- 
pathy He feels, and enriching their happiness by His 
tender joy. Nor do I hesitate to say, with Renan, that the 
history of the Passion becomes intelligible so soon as the 
Fourth Gospel is introduced ; that without it the supreme 
tragedy of time has no reason for its being; but the mo- 
ment its voice is heard as the voice of truth, all is simple 
and all clear. And John's is the pen which describes the 
scene at the cross, where the Son, in the hour of His agony 
and death, does not forget His mother or the duty He owed 
to her. And "the disciple whom Jesus loved" proves the 
essential womanliness of his nature by attracting Mary and 
by ministering unto her the comfort she so sorely needs. 
And his is the hand which describes the scene in the garden 
where Mary the Magdalene and Jesus meet in the wondrous 
moment of revelation and recognition. These are but a 
few examples of the vivid delicacy with which John touches, 
as no other evangelist, the great Central Figure of his his- 
tory with the lineaments of humanity, the Christ whom 
he had introduced as the only-begotten of the Father, 
descended to dwell as His visible glory among men. In 
His person, the sight and vision, the experience of the 
temporal and the dream of the eternal are fused into unity ; 
the man is realized in the God, while the God is mani- 
fested in the man. 

2. Multitudes are akin to John in the tender and medi- 
tative, the reverent and contemplative spirit which loves 
to move round the Master, and will not let Him go till His 



SOME QUALITIES AND THOSE WHO HAVE THEM 587 

mystic meaning be read, without being of his kin in the 
daring speculative mind which will not love till it has 
construed His Person. Yet both qualities are found 
united in John ; and also in those beautiful and pious souls 
which form the constellation that surrounds and accom- 
panies the apostle of love, reflecting his light. That 
constellation is made up of stars too innumerable for any 
man to resolve ; but among them walk, in radiant beauty, 
some of the rarest spirits the church has known. Origen, 
the most learned and the boldest of the fathers, leaves the 
active ecclesiastics of his time to lead the people and to 
smite the public eye, while he, dwelling with his scholars 
and amid his books, seeks that he may find the truth which 
made the Light of the world its Life and its Love. Ber- 
nard, saint and reformer of the Middle Ages, sees his way 
through their darkness and corruption by the light which 
comes to a soul that loves, and so lives within the 
bosom of the Master as to feel its own being lost in 
His. Tauler, made by mystic contemplation to see 
that only by escape from himself could he save him- 
self, was taught by John that the only sure way to this end 
was so to throw round the neck of God the right arm of 
love and the left arm of humility that he could not but 
be happy, for wherever he went God would go with him. 
And like unto him is Madame Guyon, so possessed 
of the passion for disinterested love, that to her the 
only possible beatitude is to be so absorbed in the love 
of God as to be made totally oblivious of self; she felt how 
the tremulous limitations of a self-regarding love vanished 
in the presence of the God who is all in all. These, and 
such like, belong to the goodly fellowship surrounding the 
beloved disciple, and live by cultivating his spirit and re- 
joicing in his light. 



588 CHARACTER OF A DIVINE AND HIS THOUGHT. 



I. This mystic soul or spirit gives to each divine who 
is like John the distinctive position which defines his work, 
determines his thought, and the quality of his reverent yet 
exalted piety. It makes his spirit sensitive to the very 
shadow of evil, averse to all methods and all actions that 
do not love the light ; it makes him shrink from irreverence 
or profanity, or impurity, or worldliness, however deli- 
cately disguised ; and, as a scholar and theologian, it gives 
him his peculiar insight into the Gospel. The mystic 
soul has everywhere this quality: it finds in the things of 
the senses the images and symbols of the spirit. For sense 
is but a window through which comes in the light, and the 
object of sense is but a shadow cast by some substantial and 
eternal thing. Its conscious symbolism is but a garment 
which veils the very ways and the very truth of God ; yet 
veils them only that they might be the more completely 
revealed. To read the symbols is to lift the veil and see 
into a world supernal and divine. 

In the Apocalypse we have a conscious and designed sym- 
bolism ; in the Gospel we have a history which is from its 
very nature and purpose symbolical. This symbolism is 
not created by the writer, but was necessary to the history, 
which was too immense in its meaning and its issues to be 
exhausted by any events that lived and moved within the 
realm of the senses. For how can we conceive an incarna- 
tion of Christ as other than symbolical in the very propor- 
tion that it is real ? If God is manifest in the flesh, does it 
not mean that He is accomplishing infinite things in the 
form of finitude, things the eye cannot see, or hand handle, or 
ear hear, which lie above and behind, within and before 



SYMBOLISM NATIVE TO JOHN 589 

the form assumed ? And what does this mean, but that 
the history of the incarnate Person must be a symbol while 
He has a history ? 

And so to John the very Person of Jesus was steeped 
in symbolism. As the Word made flesh, He was the true 
Shekinah, the visible image of the eternal glory. He 
was the true Priest, the Temple, the Sacrifice, the Lamb, 
which bears the sin of the world. Men could eat His flesh, 
and drink His blood, and those who did had Hfe within 
them. He was the Light of the world, and its Life; its 
Resurrection and its Judge; the Good Shepherd, and the 
True Vine. In Him stood revealed the past life, the present 
action, and the future purpose of God. Hence what He did, 
and what was done to Him, took on the like symbolic mean- 
ing with His person, yet all remained only the more real. 
So the history is made to exhibit a two-fold process : (a) the 
action of God against sin, and (^) the action of sin against 
God . The mercy that had stooped to save was mocked and 
rejected by the very sin that had appealed to it, and moved 
it to help. And, in the Jews, the official but faithless heads 
of the chosen people, sin stood incarnate over against the 
incarnate Deity, erected His cross, offered Him in sacrifice. 
So were disclosed in one and the same act the might of sin 
and the sovereignty of grace. 

2. But now we must remark how little we can allow even 
this divine history, with all its symbolic sense, to be abolished 
and to satisfy us. We cannot part with the historical Jesus 
Christ; but then the historical is incomplete without the 
heavenly, of whom history had prophesied. The fulness of 
Christ was not exhausted in His public ministry, or in the 
Gospel as history. Nay, rather the Gospel ended in a prom- 
ise and an expectation ; showed the Lord lost to sight that 
He might begin to live to faith by His session at the right 



590 AFFINITY YET CONTRAST BETWEEN 

hand of the Father. And so we may say that we are, by a 
truly Johannine love of the personal Saviour, carried on- 
wards to his vision of the ascended and the living Christ. 
Hence came the emphasis it is necessary to lay upon the 
resurrection. But it must be made at once more spiritual 
and more real than it has been. The resurrection has, as 
its antecedent, the death, but not in the death alone had 
the life culminated, but rather in the resurrection ; and even 
this was but the prelude to the ascension and the exaltation. 
And the Ascended lived to continue and complete the work 
which had been begun in the days of the humiliation. His 
work involved a priesthood, which was eternal, but a priest- 
hood without the priest. And so the Apocalypse came 
back and took its place as a continuation, in a sense, of the 
Gospel. While the one bade you look backward, the other 
bids you look before. The Gospel ends with the ascension, 
but the Apocalypse begins with the vision of the Ascended, 
and opens out into the marvellous succession of scenes which 
show all the sons of God around Him, and made one through 
the Lamb. And it is our duty to see the unity of the his- 
torical .and the apocalyptical, the infinite Spirit in the his- 
tory, the imperishable history in the vision, and the Divine 
reality of the whole. 

3. John loved the church, and therefore its Head. His 
love of the church was, in a sense, jealousy for her Founder. 
He could not bear to see the white garments of the Bride 
soiled, for they must be beautiful and radiant in honour of 
the heavenly Bridegroom. For His sake the church in her 
outward being and form, as well as in her inner being and 
spirit, must be loved . We believe that while the priesthood 
of the Head is eternal in the heavens, the priesthood of the 
church, which is His body, is exercised on earth: each is 
a counterpart of the other, and both are necessary to the 



THE APOCALYPSE AND THE FOURTH GOSPEL 59I 

complete saving of man. And as the heavenly Priest was 
sinless, the priesthood of earth could be fitly fulfilled only 
by a church without spot or blemish. And as John so con- 
ceived the church, he held the liberty and the opportunity 
of service to be its highest honour. He ever bore himself 
as one who had been called into it by Jesus Christ, and was 
responsible to Him who had called him. This sense of 
honour was finely balanced by the sense of duty, which was 
expressed in the meekness yet dignity of his spirit, in the 
constancy and completeness of his devotion. The vastness 
of the sea and the calm of the clear heaven which lay round 
him in Patmos seemed slowly to work themselves into the 
imagination, yet not in their visible, but in their invisible, 
form, and gradually there unfolded the dream which was 
the comfort of his mind. From our troubled attempts at 
realizing the church, from the hindrances that stood in the 
way of the happier and holier times, John turned to what 
was the familiar contemplation of his spirit, the church as 
it lived to its Head, the church as the home of the Spirit, 
which, ever indwelling in the whole, attracted, held to- 
gether, and inspired all its parts. The thought that what 
so perplexed and troubled man was the concern of God, in 
His hands and under His guidance, took possession alike of 
imagination and of heart, and communion with the eternal 
was a translation into the presence of God. 



XI 
JOHN THE APOSTLE 



I . T DO not feel as if any discussion on John were either 
^ adequate or satisfactory which did not attempt to 
interpret the leading thought of the Fourth Gospel. If 
there be such a discussion, it must begin with the relation 
between the prologue and the history. For the relation is 
primary. The prologue states in warm and concrete terms 
ideas so majestic and impressive that thought has, in order 
that it may sanely reason concerning things so sublime, 
to disguise them in cold and abstract language ; the history 
shows, by means of breathing and articulate men, how 
these ideas can, when suitably impersonated, satisfy the 
heart by solving the most obstinate questionings of the 
head. The prologue may be described as a thesis; the his- 
tory may be termed its explication. Without the history 
the prologue would be but a speculative dream, singular 
neither in its metaphysics nor in its terminology ; without 
the prologue the history would be but a fragment of biog- 
raphy with a beautiful personality for its centre, but in- 
credible incidents for its circumference. The two points 
of view need to be combined before the Gospel will dis- 
course to the soul a music it cannot choose but hear. 

Yet to show the relation between the two is but a method 
of exegesis, which uses the prologue to construe the history, 

592 



PROLOGUE DISTINCTIVE OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 593 

and the history to illustrate the prologue. What is needed 
to complete the process, is to test the joint result by an 
appeal to the soul it is intended to satisfy. We shall (i) try 
to interpret each through the other ; and (2) attempt to see 
what the heart and conscience and reason of man has to 
say to this interpretation. 

2. The prologue is the most distinctive thing in John, 
which means that it has no parallel in the Synoptic Gos- 
pels. Mark, with what seems equal simplicity and courage, 
begins his history with the baptism of Jesus, saying nothing 
as to His birth, and leaving His words and actions to tell 
their own tale. Matthew and Luke, writing for readers 
more curious and critical, seek to give coherence and 
credibility to their narratives by prefacing them with 
genealogies which describe His descent according to the 
flesh, and stories of His miraculous conception which de- 
scribe His filiation according to the spirit. Yet the two 
Synoptists have a difference : — the genealogy of Matthew, 
which is egressive, begins with Abraham, and comes down 
to Jesus; that of Luke, which is regressive, ends with 
Adam, ''who was the son of God." The aim, therefore, of 
Matthew is to prove Jesus a Jew, sprung from the chosen 
people, the Child of the promise, born to fulfil the law and 
the prophets ; but the aim of Luke is to prove Him a man, 
the descendant of the common Father, who shares our com- 
mon lot and possesses our attributes, and therefore He is 
the Child of humanity, able to speak to all because akin to 
all. The two aims are rather complementary than incom- 
patible. Matthew's affirms that within our common man- 
hood there is a special clanship ; Luke's, that our nature 
comes from the race, though our peculiar character and 
customs are from the family and the tribe. The genealo- 
gies agree that the same law of descent holds in both cases, in 

2Q 



594 UNLIKE THE BIRTH-STORIES IN MATTHEW AND LUKE, 

the case of Jesus as in our own, and that His ancestors, Hke 
ours, were not immaculate ; for if sinful forefathers meant 
a guilty descendant, He could not have been innocent. 
They claimed for Him, whether as Son of Abraham or 
of Adam, no immunity from the common inheritance of 
feebleness and shame. 

3. As are the genealogies, such also are the birth -stories. 
Matthew's is, in all its accidents, incidents, local colouring, 
and temporal conditions, Jewish; prophecy is fulfilled 
in the very name the Child bears. He is called Jesus, 
''for He shall save His people from their sins." Luke's is 
ethnic, describes how Mary became "the handmaid of the 
Lord," and conceived "the Son of God," who came to 
establish an everlasting kingdom, to give glory to the highest 
God and create peace on earth. What is common to the 
two is the feeling that they are about to describe a person 
so compacted of Deity and humanity as to be inconceivable 
without their manifest concurrence as joint factors of His 
being. The genealogy shows His dependence upon man; 
His birth proves how He transcends him. They agree in 
affirming the significance of descent — and this significance 
is no recent discovery. But they differ: Jesus in the one 
is made as the Child of Abraham, a Jew and a Semite ; and 
in the other He is represented as a Son of Adam, and a 
man. The one, being Hebrew, avoids saying, "He is the 
Son of God" ; the other, being both Hellenic and Hellen- 
istic, says boldly, "He is, while man, the Son of the High- 
est." Matthew could only oppose God and man, and Luke, 
who unites them, could and did believe that sons of men 
were also sons of God. 

4. But John, though of all the evangelists the man of the 
boldest and most speculative mind, and also the most tender 
and trustful heart, feels as if he could not follow any of the 



ANTITHESIS OF TRANSCENDENTAL AND MIRACULOUS IN JOHN 595 

synoptic methods. He could not, like Mark, write simply 
as a witness of events conceived to be supernatural, for was 
he not a disciple and a thinker as well as a witness ? and 
how could he show us what he had seen, or tell us what he 
had heard, without any attempt to give us his own eyes to 
see with or his own mind to understand with ? He could 
not, like Matthew and Luke, invoke the aid of a genealogy 
to authenticate the humanity of Jesus, for to him that 
humanity was too separate and singular to be explained 
through His ancestry ; nor could he, like them, use a miracu- 
lous birth-story to define Christ's Deity and distinguish 
Him from man, for he conceived His transcendence as of 
a kind no sensuous process could symbolize or prove. 
The empirical questions as to the links and stages of His 
descent, or as to the mode of His conception and manner of 
His birth, which seemed so vital to the older evangelists, 
had thus no interest and possibly no significance for John. 
Hence it has been said that the evangelist who had the 
highest notion of the person had no belief in either the 
supernatural conception or the miraculous birth ; but what 
was material to him was the person of the Redeemer, His 
essential nature as implying His essential relations, the 
ultimate cause of His appearance as defining the character 
and end of His work. ''Find and determine these things," 
he seems to say, ''and the whole truth as to God, nature, 
man, and history is found and determined. The cause is 
a sufficient reason for all the effects that follow from it. 
God as the sovereign source of all things is a transcendental 
but not a miraculous Being. If we conceive Him aright, 
we shall also conceive the Christ who is His Word; for to 
conceive either as an isolated or unordered miracle is to 
dwell in a universe that knows no God, and to possess a 
nature that knows nothing of mind and spirit." 



596 PROLOGUE STUDIED (a) FROM BELOW, (/3) FROM ABOVE. 



II 

I. The purpose, then, of the prologue, looked at from 
below, is to bind man and nature to Christ and Christ to 
God ; or, looked at from above, it is so to conceive God as 
to make creation and providence, the incarnation and re- 
demption, spring from the spontaneous evolution of the 
Godhead. John would not, therefore, disconnect time 
from eternity, but would make time eternal. He desires not 
to isolate man from God, but so to interpret Christ through 
God as to make Him the symbol and the means of God's con- 
stant and essential indwelling in man. The history he is 
about to write is brief, a mere fraction cut out of a fleeting 
moment; but he seeks to bind this fugitive fraction of an 
instant man can neither seize nor detain to the eternity 
man can neither measure nor occupy. Infinity thus at 
once magnifies and transfigures the history it holds and 
sustains. 

Once in the margin of the Bible, opposite its opening 
verse, *'In the beginning God created the heavens and 
the earth," stood the date ''4004 B.C." This short life 
was not only assigned to the earth, but also reflected in 
the idea of its insignificance. It was but a single con- 
tinent whose mountains were like huge links in the chain 
which held its scattered parts together, whose valleys were 
the deep furrows on its ancient face, wetted and washed 
by rains, fretted and worn by tempests, seared by fires 
within, scorched by the sun without. The earth floated upon 
mysterious and pathless seas which did not rise and drown 
the world, though rivers poured without ceasing floods of 
water into their bosom. In the heavens which formed its 
roof, the radiant sun rose daily, issued from the east like 



(a) BINDS GOD THROUGH CHRIST TO NATURE AND HISTORY 597 

a bridegroom from his chamber, strode towards the west 
with the majesty of a god, and died amid incomparable 
glories of coloured and pillared clouds. The pale-faced 
moon as she slowly climbed the sky shed madness from 
her beams, and in the darkness the stars came out like 
lamps to light men to bed. But when geology had de- 
ciphered the hieroglyphs which the hand of man had not 
graven on the rocks, and read of a creation which ran 
through periods of time too illimitable for thought to 
define; when astronomy had explored the azure roof 
above us, and found it to be space without bounds within 
which circled and shone systems and suns innumerable, 
then man, studying the little point he knew as the mirror 
and the epitome of the infinite whole he did not know, 
awoke to the mystery of being, and questioned and looked 
at it with other and clearer eyes. He did not feel as if the 
immensity which he had just discovered had dwarfed into 
insignificance the minute house he inhabited ; on the con- 
trary, his home grew but the richer and the more signifi- 
cant, for was it not an epitome of the whole, and did it not 
hold within it secrets the imagination might represent but 
the eye could not discern ? 

2. And this vision of a creation without beginning 
did not come alone to enhance the glory of the Creator; 
for the discoveries which revealed the majestic mag- 
nitude of the universe disclosed also the complexity yet 
simple perfection of all its parts. The creative process 
lengthened behind us till time was lost in eternity, and 
as the sphere of the created widened around us place ex- 
panded into immensity ; below us, in the leaf or the insect, 
the creative achievement was seen to be as careful and 
as perfect as in the man. Yet without the fixed point of 
earth the immensity of the universe and the perfection of 



59^ (/3) GOD BECOMES NO MERE ABSTRACT BEING. 

its minutest parts could not have been known ; as without 
the ideas of the infinite and the everlasting the meaning of 
earth could never have been interpreted or its mystery re- 
vealed. In like manner, John in his prologue interprets all 
things through God and sees all in Him. He finds, in the 
terms Logos and Son, the ideas which turn God from mere 
abstract existence into a Being concrete and living. He 
discovers in these the truths which breathe grandeur 
into his conception of Christ, and through Him confer 
dignity on nature and man, as well as reality on redemp- 
tion. And therefore we can say: the history of Jesus, 
read through this prologue, transfigures man and fills his 
actual history and possible destiny with the mind and life 
and majesty of God. 



HI 

But besides the general ideas of the prologue, the verse * 
which closes it emphasizes certain special ideas as to God, 
as to the Son of God, and as to His function in the scheme 
of things. 

I . As to God, it is said : ' ' No man hath seen Him at any 
time." The inability to see God is absolute; the finite 
can perceive only the finite; the perfect vision of the 
Infinite is what man, whether embodied or disembodied, 
can never attain. What is seen occurs at a given moment, 
occupies a given space, stands before the eye defined, 
outlined, shaped, and beset by all the conditions of finitude. 
The infinite can alone behold the Infinite, the mind that 
does not fill immensity and has not lived from eternity 
is without the eye that can see the Unbounded, or the 
thought that can perceive the Eternal. But not to see and 

* John i. i8. 



THE INVISIBLE GOD NOT SAME AS UNCOMPREHENDED 599 

not to know are things not simply distinct, but dissimilar. 
We may know all the better that we do not see. John, 
for example, repeats this aphorism in his first Epistle,* yet 
with a most significant difference. It occurs in the midst 
of a most rapturous discussion on love : Love is absolute, 
for it constitutes the essence of God.f Love is sovereign, 
for it determined His greatest and most characteristic 
act, the mission of His Son. J Love is creative, for God's 
love is the cause of all the love in us.§ Love is universal, 
for, since God loved us, "we ought to love one another." || 
Love is reciprocal, for ''we love Him because He first 
loved us. "If Love is the evidence of His presence and the 
energy of His spirit, for ''if we love one another, God abid- 
eth in us and His love is perfected in us."** The argu- 
ment at every point is but an expansion of the principle 
from which it started: "every one that loveth is begotten 
of God, and knoweth God";tt and the clause, "No man 
hath seen God at any time," is introduced to contrast out- 
ward vision, which is not knowledge, with the inner ex- 
perience or affection, which is. Sight may deceive in a 
thousand ways; but love is truth, and cannot bear to de- 
ceive or be deceived. We may for years pass a man on the 
street, know his gait, his figure, his stature, his complexion, 
his voice, all that constitutes his outer form and being ; and 
yet not know the man. We may be able to describe or cari- 
cature him to an acquaintance without revealing his iden- 
tity to a friend . To know him we must find the way into the 
house where lives the woman he loves, who loves him, and 
the children he and she love together. We must watch him 
there, not as he is made up to meet the eyes of men in the 
street, at business, or on the Exchange ; but as he is, where 

* I John iv. 12. t 8. J 9, 10. § 16. 

II I John iv. II. ^ 19. ** 12. ft 7- 



6oo FATHERHOOD IMPOSSIBLE WITHOUT SONSHIP. 

the nature that is stronger than will can have its way, in 
his moods of exultation or in his hours of shame, when he 
rejoices in his strength or moans in his weakness, laughs in 
his joy or cries in his sorrow, speaks in his meanness or 
boasts in his pride. Sense may play upon us many a fan- 
tastic trick, but experience has the awful power of forcing us 
to face reality ; and in the very process of getting to know, 
to make ourselves known. So we are grateful that *'no 
man hath seen God at any time," for a visible God were 
nothing but a spectre of man's own making. Where sight 
is impossible knowledge may be real, for ''he who loveth" 
knoweth the God who ''is love." 

2. "The only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the 
Father." Now there are in this clause one or two notable 
things. There is the strictest correlation between the terms 
"Son" and "Father." Where the one is the other must 
be; where either is not neither can be. If theSonshipisnot 
essential to Deity, there can be no essential Fatherhood. 
The terms, then, signify that God is, if we may so speak, not 
an abstract Simplicity, but a concrete Society ; His eternal 
perfection is not an inaccessible solitude, but a beatitude 
which must be social in order to be. But, besides their 
correlative necessity, the terms bring out the meaning of 
the phrase "God is love"; and without distinction of 
persons there could not be any knowledge or reasoning in 
God, but with this phrase as its premiss consciousness in- 
evitably follows. For if God were an eternal solitary He 
could not be essential love or spirit. An object is as neces- 
sary to love as a subject ; a person to be loved as a person to 
love. To say, then, "God is love," is to say He is social; 
for without personal subsistences in the Godhead, how 
could love have a realm for its being, and a field for its 
exercise? And this truth receives in the prologue char- 



THE SON AS THE REVEALING WORD 6oi 

acteristic, if unconscious, expression. The Johannine 
ideas associated with the Logos are two, "Life" and 
''Light": *'in Him was Hfe," and therefore He created; 
but once the creation had happened, the ''Life" became 
"the Light of men." And the moment the terms "only 
begotten" appear, two other Johannine ideas, which in 
importance far transcend the "Light" and the "Life," at 
once emerge, "Grace and Truth." For these the concrete 
and personal name is "Son" : ' Grace and Truth came by- 
Jesus Christ."* What this means is obvious: if we think 
of God as Father, we think of Him through the Son, and 
these terms in correlation signify communicated and re- 
ciprocated love. The phrases, therefore, are interchange- 
able, and express the same fundamental ideas. When in 
the Gospel John says, "the only begotten Son which is in 
the bosom of the Father," and in his first Epistle, "God is 
love," he simply says the same thing. 

3. As to the Son's function in Revelation, we read that 
"He hath declared Him^ The clause brings the other 
two together and follows from both — completes both. 
"No man hath seen God at any time " ; but where sight has 
failed love has succeeded. 'The only begotten Son who 
is in the bosom of the Father," who therefore knew God 
as God from within and by experience, and not merely 
from without and by vision — "He hath declared Him'^ 
And this assumes, and indeed affirms, a philosophical prin- 
ciple of primary importance. Men argue as if our ignorance 
of the Infinite God was solely a matter of our own incom- 
petence, due to the insufficiency of human faculty, or man's 
inability to reach and to know. But the argument to be 
valid must mean much more than this : — God must suffer 
from a deeper incapability than even man ; for if man can- 

* i. 17. 



6o2 IN THE APOSTLES HUMANITY SURROUNDS JESUS- 

not know Him it must be because He is unable to make Him- 
self known. Human impotence is here but the negative pole 
of a current whose positive is the want of power or of will 
in Deity. If men cannot know Him, it follows that He 
cannot speak or show Himself to man. Now, John's argu- 
ment inverts this principle : ^ men cannot see God, there- 
fore God must declare Himself; and whatever happens 
He will not leave us in ignorance, with eyes searching for 
a light they cannot find. He who made the light shine in 
the darkness will cause a higher and purer light to shine in 
our hearts. And the function of the Son is to be the symbol 
of the love which cannot be spoken, yet will not be silent. 
Nature may be the visible garment of Deity, yet we may 
see and touch the robe He wears without seeing and touch- 
ing Himself. But what Nature could not perform the Son 
has accomplished; He has spoken of the Father as one 
who has lived in His bosom, who knows God as God knows 
Himself, and who can therefore enable man to look at his 
Maker and His ways with the eye and experience of Deity. 
To do this the Son came as the only begotten who is in the 
bosom of the Father. He hath made visible the God no 
man can see. 



IV 

But now let us pass to the history, which, by a series of 
distinct and personified incidents brings out the meaning 
of the prologue. A person is to John no mere moving 
figure, but an embodied idea. The biography he writes is 
the history of the universe in miniature. In it light struggles 
with darkness, and now the darkness is hostile to the light, 
and now men who love the light walk in darkness and 
struggle to escape out of its hands. The history, which 



THE HISTORY AS COMFORTABLE EXPERIENCE FOR JESUS 603 

we are about to study, is all the more real that it is a parable 
in which the soul perplexed by the half-withdrawn light 
though walking in darkness and groping towards the true 
light may see itself. 

I. The history like a calm and comforting hour had 
come to Jesus and His disciples, and stands amid storms 
like a column of light whose beneficent sunshine bathes 
His soul; while from His fellowship comes a gracious 
balm which breathes serenity into the spirit of His dis- 
ciples * He and they are like travellers who have climbed 
a lofty mountain with the dense mist so clinging to its 
steep sides as to impede their progress, hide their path, 
and create the appalling fear of being lost, or the horror 
lest a step onward should be an irrevocable step to destruc- 
tion. But at last and suddenly they have struggled on 
to the summit and into the sunshine, whence they can 
watch the lean and ragged fingers of the mist begin to 
relax their hold on shoulder and peak, making the dark 
gorges visible ; and as the mist-cloud draws out of the val- 
leys and lifts from the plains they can see the vine-clad slopes, 
the white homesteads, the distant villages and towns, 
lying fair and beautiful in the sunlight. Nor does the 
scene below alone appeal to the eye; above the great 
mountains raised into the silent but glorious heaven their 
capped heads crowned with perennial snow, made all the 
more radiant by the eternal azure which seemed to em- 
bosom them, and the purple hues which played upon their 
brows. But as the Master and the disciples stood there, 
wearied by their toil, yet exhilarated by the scene and the 
sunshine, new clouds began to gather, thunders to mutter, 
the sound of a coming tempest filled the air, and a dark- 
ness blacker than night descended to blot out the radiant 

* John xiv. 



6o4 THE TWELVE AN EPITOME OF MAN. 

day. Yet between the natural scene and the spiritual ex- 
perience there is this difference: here the Master alone 
feels the shadow of His approaching passion, and the one 
thing the disciples know is the joy of the rest and the sun- 
light. 

2. In these men, then, humanity surrounds .Jesus; 
the twelve are an epitome of man, yet of man with eyes 
the Lord has opened. Their eyes are so unaccustomed 
to the light that they cannot measure distance or judge 
proportion, because they see men as trees walking. New 
instincts and hopes mingle in their imaginations with 
ancient faiths and facts; and they feel themselves to be 
men of bewildered and troubled minds. But He has the 
lucid soul from which nothing is hid. He knows their 
perplexity, and He foresees His own passion; yet though 
to foresee is to forefeel, He forgets His own sorrow in the 
desire to strengthen them against theirs. And this He 
does by interpreting and so resolving the perplexities 
they feel but cannot explain. ''Let not your heart be 
troubled,"* He says. There is, indeed, trouble enough in 
life ; some real, more made, a creation of art rather than of 
Nature and Providence ; but, more curious than the making 
of trouble, is the comfort many find in foretelling it. There 
are people who cannot see a child at play, or a youth strenu- 
ous in the pursuit of some high ideal, or a bride standing in 
winsome grace beside her bridegroom, or a man struggling 
under some great enterprise which promises to increase 
human happiness, without saying, ''Ah! wait awhile; this 
fair hour of promise and of hope will soon pass, and dis- 
illusion, disappointment, sorrow, will inevitably come. In 
the very moment of joy it is well to have the heart troubled 
with the anticipation of evil. ' ' But that is only the language 

* John xiv. I. 



MELANCHOLY NOT THE SIGN OF MAGNANIMITY 605 

of embittered impotence, or of a spirit that cannot bear 
another's happiness because it has never deserved or earned 
its own . The true note of magnanimity is not to pour hope- 
less and imbecile melancholy upon a glad heart ; but to shed 
sunshine and hope upon the hearts that sit fearful in the 
darkness. Here is Jesus, feeling, all unknown to His dis- 
ciples, the shadow of the cross and the burden of the world's 
sin ; and He does not seek to sadden them by the foreknow- 
ledge of His passion, but rather to increase their joy that 
they may be the better able to bear the coming loneliness 
and desolation: ''Let not your heart be troubled; ye 
believe in God."* 

3. The man who believes in God believes in a universe 
the devil has not made and does not rule. If beneficent 
goodness governs, what permanent harm can come to 
the good ? If man looks to his soul's state, God will look 
to its happiness. "Believe also in Me."t That was to 
be a harder task and a higher duty. Belief was easy while 
He still lived, but would be difficult when they saw Him 
die upon the cross, forsaken of God, abhorred of man. 
Yet how, apart from their belief, could faith in Him con- 
tinue? And so He binds together faith in the God who 
could not be seen and faith in Himself who, though still 
visible, was so soon to be visible no more. The union was 
too natural to be dissoluble. If God alone is holy, could 
the holy Jesus owe His existence to any other Being? If 
God be absolutely just, could He forsake the righteous and 
perfect man simply because evil men had hated Him and had 
by craft compassed His death ? If He had been so forsaken, 
faith in God would have perished of the act. ''In My 
Father's house are many mansions."! Where God is heaven 
is, and His home is the universe. But heaven is a place of 

* Ihid. t Ihid. % xiv. 2. 



6o6 PERSOx^TS IN THE GOSPEL AS TYPES. 

''many mansions," where every soul will find a house 
suitable to its capacity, its stage of culture, or whatever we 
may term the nature or quality which demands a special 
and adapted environment. "I go to prepare a place for 
you."* He has a function in eternity as well as in time; 
there as here He knows every man, and for each He makes 
ready a place that shall be a home indeed. 



I. "And whither I go, ye know the way."t Here the 
significant dialogue begins ; man is by John so impersonated 
in the disciples that each person is a type, who represents a 
distinct species of the genus man. Thomas is man prosaic, 
sensuous, positive as to the reality of things seen, very 
doubtful as to the existence or truth of the unseen. He is 
often described as the "unbelieving Thomas," but he would 
be better named the "misbelieving." Sceptics are of two 
classes, those who so believe their reason that they will not 
trust their senses, and those who so trust their senses that 
they will not believe their reason. The former are intel- 
lectually subtle, and argue themselves into disbelief not 
only of the senses, but of the processes and products of the 
very reason which they must trust to be rational; the 
latter are intellectually simple, and argue themselves into 
disbelief of the reason because its judgments and inferences 
contradict the testimony of the senses or impugn their 
veracity. To the one class, the philosophical sceptics, 
belong the men who doubt because they think, and whose 
doubt, as it is the product of reason, only reason can over- 
come ; the other class comprehends the slaves of habit, the 

* Ihid. t xiv. 4, 



THOMAS REPRESENTS MAN AS SENSUOUS 607 

children of custom and convention, who walk by sight, and 
speak of seeing as believing, and who are so credulous as to 
trust only what the hands have handled and the fingers 
have touched. 

Now it is to this class that Thomas belongs, an honest 
man, strong and courageous where he can see and feel, 
resolved not to go one step farther than his senses show 
him to be safe, yet ready to trust them whatever they 
may say or wherever they may lead. So when Jesus pro- 
poses to go to the dead Lazarus, "to the intent ye may 
believe," Thomas, with the courage of a man who could 
follow and the obstinacy of a man who could not believe 
what his senses did not certify, said, ''Let us also go that 
we may die with Him."* And so, too, when he heard the 
other disciples discoursing with ecstasy on the appearances 
of the risen Lord, he dourly said : — ''Except I shall see in 
His hands the print of the nails,and put my finger into the 
print of the nails, and put my hand into His side, I will not 
believe."! The man wanted to believe; but he could not, 
his conscience would not allow him, till his senses were 
satisfied. So with characteristic bluntness and no less 
characteristic blindness where things of the Spirit were at 
issue, he said, "Lord, we know not whither Thou goest; 
how know we the way ? " J Jesus answers in a fashion that 
must have bewildered Thomas still more : "I am the way, 
the truth, and the life," § i.e. the path that conducts to the 
goal, the light that illumines the path, and the goal to which 
it conducts. He is all in all, everywhere and for every one 
sufficient, as solitary and preeminent in His person and 
functions as is the Deity. And then, in the familiar Johan- 
nine method translating the abstract into the concrete, 
He adds: "No one cometh unto the Father but by Me: 

* John xi, 16. t XX. 25. { xiv. 5. § xiv. 6. 



6o8 AND PHILIP REPRESENTS MAN AS INTELLECTUAL. 

he who has known Me has known Him ; in Me He has be- 
come visible." * 

2. And now while Thomas is silently pondering the 
mysterious answer he has received, the change in the mode 
of speech calls up another interlocutor. Philip is a man 
little known, but the little we do know is suggestive. He 
is neither sent by the Baptist nor brought by another, but 
"found " by Jesus Himself, f They were attracted to each 
other by affinities of spirit. And two things indicate the 
kind of man he was: (a) his special friend, the man he 
could claim as convert and companion, was Nathanael, the 
guileless Israelite,} and (^) the Greeks who wanted to see 
Jesus come first to Philip, and were brought to the Master 
by him.§ He was evidently a meditative man, drawn by 
the gentleness of God, giving light by seeking it, touched by 
the quest of men for the humanities of Deity. 

So the reference to the Father appealed to his deepest 
need and woke the desire that most consumed him. ' ' Lord ! 
shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us."| | Jesus starts like 
one smitten with sudden pain, though it is pain that has a 
heart of pleasure, and asks : ' ' Have I been so long time with 
you, and dost thou not know Me, Philip ? ' ' Did you ever try 
to teach men, and had you ever a loved pupil of high promise 
over whom you have spent brooding nights and toilsome 
days in the hope that all his promise might yet be realized ? 
And have you never found in some ecstatic moment of 
thought and discussion this same pupil put a question 
which showed that he had never seen into the heart of 
your teaching, or even so much as guessed that it had a 
heart? You may then be inclined to blame your own 
blundering or your fatal inability to be articulate where 

* John xiv. 7. t John i. 43. J John i. 45-7. 

§ xii. 20-2. II xiv. 8-9. 



HE CONFESSES GOD TO BE HIS DEEPEST NEED 609 

the deepest beliefs are concerned, and to forget that what 
you have won by agony of thought and experience cannot 
be understood by those who have never been cradled by 
suffering into thought. If that has been your experience, 
then you will be able to understand the mood and mind 
of Jesus, His pain at having a disciple who had not learned, 
His joy at discovering the disciple to be still a learner 
whose ignorance was richer than any knowledge. For in 
Philip Jesus heard the voice of collective man confess his 
deepest need, "Shew us the Father"; heard, too, men 
speak that word of infinite promise, "and it sufficeth us." 
The fact that "no man hath seen God at any time," and 
that he must yet see Him or die, begets the prayer, "Lord, 
shew us the Father"; and the answer, which assures 
peace, is, "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." 
"The only begotten, who is in the bosom of the Father, 
He hath interpreted the invisible God." Jesus as the 
revelation of the God who cannot be seen is the governing 
idea of John's Gospel ; and the man who sees Him is satis- 
fied. He loves, and therefore he knows the God who is 
love. 



2R 



XII 
JOHN THE APOSTLE 

I 

'T^HE questions which our attempts at interpreting both 
^ the prologue and the history have raised, must now be 
discussed . What value and validity for man have the ideas 
as to the invisible God who has become visible in the Son ? 
Can he and they be said to correspond ? Can they be de- 
scribed as ideas that, although not products of his reason, 
yet appeal to it and satisfy it ? And have they any light 
to shed on the general problem of the relation of revelation 
to nature and mind ? 

I. The prologue which started our discussion stated an 
incapacity of nature in the form of a fact of experience — 
"no man hath seen God at any time"; the history ex- 
presses a need of nature which the incapacity makes only 
the more urgent and acute : ** Shew us the Father." These 
are what we may call the antinomies of nature and expe- 
rience, laws which may seem to be opposed, but which can 
neither invalidate nor annul one another. Man's need 
for God is too strong to be satisfied by the plea of a natural 
incapacity; his desire to find Him is too invincible to 
be silent at the bidding of an impotent experience. The 
saying of Augustine is familiar to all: ''Thou hast 
made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till 
they rest in Thee." Now the inquietude of the heart 
is but its need of God expressed in dumb desire. 

6io 



ATHEISM AS THING OF ART AND NOT OF NATURE 6 II 

Man was made by God for God, and he cannot do without 
the God who made him. Atheism is a thing of art, not of 
nature; an individual may train or persuade himself to 
believe it, but it has never been the spontaneous belief of 
any tribe or age, never the collective need of any century 
or speech of any country. At most it is but a negation, 
and a negation is without the secret of life; it may have 
power to destroy, but it has none to construct. It is only 
a beHef that another belief is false; it is not a belief that 
a given truth is so real that the universe may be 
built on it, and that what bears up the universe may well 
support our lives. And this is what faith in God means 
to the soul, and why the soul feels so insatiable a need for 
the faith. 

2. It is now a generation since the autobiography of John 
Stuart Mill was published, but it is full of lessons that 
can never grow old. In it he told us that his father thought 
dualism more reasonable than monotheism, and agnosti- 
cism more reasonable than either ; for he had come to the 
conclusion that concerning the origin of things nothing 
whatever could be known; that he himself was one of 
the really few who had been brought up outside the Chris- 
tian religion, who had never believed or practised it, and 
who as socially and intellectually independent of it was 
able to think of it justly and judge it impartially. But 
in so writing he forgot several things he ought to have 
remembered: (i) While his father came to think in the 
way just stated he did not begin by so thinking. He was 
trained for the Christian ministry; was a candidate for 
the ministerial office, and would have been a minister if 
he had been accepted by a congregation. (ii) The position 
he reached he reached by, reaction against his own under- 
standing of the theology in which he had been educated. 



6l2 STUART MILL UNDERSTANDS NEITHER HIMSELF NOR HIS 

The God he rejected was not "the Father of our Lord 
Jesus Christ," but a perfectly impossible deity, an almighty 
maker of hell for men and men for hell. If James Mill 
had but thought more consistently he would have seen 
that to deny this God was to become not an atheist, but 
rather a more perfect theist. 

(iii) John Stuart Mill showed how little he understood 
either himself or his day or the Christian religion when 
he spoke of having been brought up outside it or in inde- 
pendence of it. That was impossible in his age and place; 
what fills the air a man breathes, what penetrates the 
language he speaks, what pervades the literature he reads, 
what leavens the thought of his people, is embodied in 
their institutions, and is the mother of all their philan- 
thropies as well as the spirit which qualitatively distin- 
guishes their modern from the ancient world, — is a thing 
from which the man cannot escape, especially if he be a 
man as susceptible and assimilative as was John Stuart 
Mill. (iv) As he misconceived the religion, he never 
judged it impartially, nor could he. He thought he was 
neutral when he was not ; and where he failed to appreciate 
he was quite unable to criticize, (v) Yet he, perhaps more 
than any man of his day, witnessed to the veracity and 
vitality of man's need for God, which persists in spite of 
the incapacity to see Him. He confessed that he did not 
believe that the universe had an author and governor in- 
finite in goodness and power, yet his whole being confessed 
that he was bound to regulate and direct his life towards 
the highest good. But a single life cannot be detached 
from the whole ; if there is a good for one there must be a 
good for all, and if obligation is to govern an individual it 
must have its sanction in the system men call the universe. 

3. Now, under what form did Mill conceive this direc- 



HIS IDEAL OF RELIGION 613 

tive power? ''The ideal of a perfect Being to whom 
he could habitually refer as the guide of conscience." 
But what did this mean save that the man who had got 
rid of God as an idea had to enthrone an ideal to do His 
work ? In other words, by denying God he was obliged to 
invent a substitute for Him ; and what sort of substitute 
did he invent? He loved; and though I may have my 
own strong convictions as to the moral character of the 
process which turned his love into a passion and broke up 
a household that but for him might have continued one 
and happy, yet I note only the fact that he loved and lost. 
And the woman he lost became, the further he retreated 
from her living presence, a memory that ruled his life. 
And he loved to think the thoughts that would have pleased 
her, to do the things she would have approved, till his atti- 
tude became a kind of worship and her memory '*a sort 
of religion." And has not this tale a moral as true as it 
is pathetic ? The man who could not believe in a God of 
** perfect goodness" found a substitute for Him in the 
apotheosis of a woman who owed her perfection and func- 
tion as an ideal to the imagination of the man who mourned 
her, and who could not bear to lose her influence from his 
life. If the logic of incapacity had never a more illustrious 
victim than John Stuart Mill, man's need for God had 
never a more veracious witness than the tragic sequel to 
his disappointed love. 

II 

I. If now man's incapacity to see God, so far from sup- 
pressing his need of Him, only renders it the more active 
and acute, are there any means or standards by which we 
can define the kind of God he needs? Well, then, it is 



6l4 MAN THE INTERPRETER OF GOD, THE THINKER. 

evident that God must represent his highest idea and that 
this idea will reflect and articulate what is best and most 
essential in himself. Now we may describe the self of 
man as constituted by reason, conscience, and heart; or 
thought, moral judgment, and a free and motived will; 
and the elements necessary to him must be repeated in his 
highest idea, the God who is the impersonated ideal that 
governs his life. 

2. Man is by preeminence the thinker; thought is his 
very essence, and the more and better he thinks the higher 
and the nobler grows his manhood. When he explains 
nature he interprets himself, for it is only in the degree that 
he perceives it to be reasonable that he becomes rational. 
But thought is a thing of spirit, not of matter: it is with- 
out form or figure, is neither ponderable nor divisible, may 
be spoken or written, communicated or evolved, but can 
neither be measured nor handled. There have, indeed, 
been men who have described thought as a product of organi- 
zation and a function of brain. "Ohne Phosphor kein 
Gedanke." Without phosphorus no thought, said one who 
imagined that to coin a graphic phrase was to solve a serious 
problem. But how out of phosphorus as a mere special 
kind of matter can you educe immaterial thought? by 
what alchemy can the ponderable be changed into the 
imponderable? by what art or craft can the atom which 
gravitation rules become the mind which speculates con- 
cerning the law that governs the universe of atoms but 
does not control thought? Things so incommensurable 
and so separated by the whole diameter of being cannot 
by experiment be converted into each other, or by analysis 
resolved into the products of a common factor. It is a 
very easy thing, indeed, to correlate organization and 
consciousness, but how does that prove organization to 



PLANETARY VISITOR INVITED TO EXPLAIN THOUGHT 615 

be the cause of thought, or thought a product of the or- 
ganized brain ? 

3. A very distinguished German biologist, who loves to 
gird at benighted theologians and to carry what he con- 
ceives to be the war into what he imagines to be their camp, 
has proposed what he considered to be here a grand test 
of truth. ''Just take," he says, ''the brain of a man, 
with all its grey matter, its lobes and wonderful convo- 
lutions, and put it in a casket, and put in a second casket 
beside it the brain of a well-developed anthropoid ape; 
then submit the two to a competent arbiter, say, the 
inhabitant of some distant planet, that he may tell us 
whether there is any insurmountable difference or im- 
passable gulf between them." Now, there are decided 
controversial advantages in this sort of reference. For one 
thing the man who makes it determines the terms of the 
problem, and to be able to do this is to make sure of the 
solution that will be offered . For another thing the arbiter, 
though he is supposed to come from another planet, is only 
another form of the man who appeals to him; and so is 
certain to return a verdict in terms agreeable to the ap- 
pellant. And thus the imaginative act is but a legal 
fiction by means of which the brains can be judicially 
declared not, indeed; to be identical, but to be capable of 
becoming so nearly alike as to be indistinguishable, so much 
so that each may be equal to performing the functions of the 
other. 

4. But let us ask our visitor to pause ; we, too, have a 
problem for him, though it somewhat differs from the one 
so lightly put and so easily solved. Bring two other caskets 
and place them alongside those already there. Into the 
one which stands beside the ape's brain let us put the 
history of his race, if history they may be said to have, telling 



6l6 PHYSICAL SCIENCE CANNOT EXPLAIN EITHER 

how they have lived in the forest, climbed trees, cracked 
nuts, courted, fought, hungered and fed, without change or 
variation from the earliest moment of observation to our 
own day. Into the casket which stands beside the brain of 
man place the history of his civilization, if not as written 
yet as transacted and realized, the story of the arts he has 
invented and the art he has cultivated ; of the empires he 
has founded, the governments he has established, the states 
and the cities he has built ; of the literatures he has written, 
the music he has created, the religions he has professed; 
of the tragedies which have made his life stern and the 
comedies which have filled it with mirth and humour; of 
the beliefs he has lived by, the ideals he has pursued, the 
hopes that have cheered his desolation, and the loves that 
have out of his very weakness made him strong. And then, 
when our two supplemental caskets have been filled, let us 
turn to our judicial visitor and say : ''We pray you, as one 
who knows how serious a thing life is and how much they 
who would live it honestly need truth as their guide, help 
us to solve this problem ; whether we may regard these two 
brains, which differ so slightly in matter, weight, and organi- 
zation, as the cause of the acts which represent the immense 
differences between their respective races and their con- 
trasted achievements. We are not greatly concerned as 
to their cranial resemblances, or as to whether the lower 
brain is capable of becoming even as the higher; but we 
do strongly desire to discover whether in their structural 
or material differences the causes of the histories distinc- 
tive of the separate owners is to be found." 

Our urgency might disturb the celestial calm of the judge 
to whom our terrestrial controversies may well seem trivial ; 
but if his heavenly pity were to overcome his natural irrita- 
tion we may conceive him replying somewhat thus: ''The 



APE OR man; he includes civilization 617 

problems move in very different regions; the brain is a 
question in the history of nature, civiHzation a question in 
the history of mind ; and effects which so differ can hardly 
be conceived as having like or equal causes." **True," we 
make reply, *' but the essential nature of the ape is unfolded 
in his history, the essential nature of man unfolded in his 
civilization ; and do you find the natures which have been 
thus unfolded stored in the brains you have been invited 
to examine?" And he answers: **How can I? Man's 
civilization is the creation of reason, thought, mind ; with- 
out these it could not have been, and these no brain made 
nor is there in its mechanism anything to show how they 
came to be. Man is mind, and though mind may need an 
organ for its material expression it cannot be conceived as 
dependent for its very existence on the organ it uses." 
"How, then, do you explain the being of mind?" "It is 
older than man, for it is the Father of all things ; it took 
shape in him because it is increate and eternal ; the Reason 
that is God brought nature into being and made man be- 
come. The root of the creation blossoms into its finest 
fruit ; the Architect of the universe could realize His uni- 
verse only by means of beings who were spirits like Him- 
self. The thought that built civilization but repeats and 
reflects the thought that created nature." 



Ill 

I. But man is conscience as well as thought. Paul 
tells us that the heathen have no written law, yet do by 
nature the things it enjoins; that they are a law to them- 
selves, and have its commands written on the tables of 
the heart ; and that the existence of this inner law is proved 
by two concordant witnesses, the voice of conscience 



6l8 MAN IS CONSCIENCE, CONSCIENCE IS LAW; 

and the moral judgments of men, whether condemnatory or 
approbatory, which they pass upon both each other and 
themselves * He also tells us that while by nature the 
knowledge of God is manifest in them,t yet it has seemed 
good to many not to retain this knowledge; J that He 
made them to obey the truth, but they have obeyed un- 
righteousness;! and that to those who seek by obedience 
to attain eternal life He will award glory, honour, and im- 
mortality; but upon those who are disobedient He will 
visit wrath and indignation. || From these positions three 
notable things follow : (a) there is in man a conscience on 
which the finger of God has written the duty required of 
him ; (/3) he is able to obey or disobey this duty ; and (7) 
God will exact from every man an account as to how he 
has dealt with this law and how he has used this freedom. 
2. These are in an equal measure truths of nature and of 
revelation ; it is because the one knows them that the other 
can speak of them and so enhance their authority. It is 
because of the law within that no virtue of the heathen 
can ever be a splendid vice ; that nature is ever on the side 
of virtue; that by following it man can at once tran- 
scend and realize himself, for he carries within a standard 
which changes him from a mortal individual into a vehicle 
of the eternal and universal; and that he is able, while 
doing what it most becomes himself to do, to do also what 
most serves man — found states, frame codes of duty, speak 
a common ethical language, recognize and fulfil common 
obligations. It is because he is free that he can do the thing 
he ought; that, since he is able to create fresh good his 
obligation to do it is absolute ; and that he is not so fettered 
by the inheritance of an ignoble past as to be absolved from 
the duty of introducing a more gracious future. And it is 

* Rom. ii. 14, 15. t i- i9- t *• 28. § 19, 21. || ii. 7, 8. 



MAN IS HEART, HE IS LOVE 619 

because God is above and over us all that actions done in 
time yet range towards eternity ; that our temporal is the 
germ of our immortal being ; that while we are, singly, but 
units, yet we do not constitute a universe of atoms, but 
a coordinated unity, created by a law which the individual 
can obey, but the whole alone can realize. Hence comes 
our conclusion : Conscience in man demands righteousness 
in God; a moral Deity is involved in a moral mankind; 
unless God be absolutely holy and pure man will not be 
able to do Him reverence. The law implanted in us re- 
quires that the highest idea, if it be so articulated as to be 
an object of worship, shall be one that while evoking adora- 
tion yet awes and uplifts the adorer. 

3. The man who is reason and conscience is also heart. It 
can be as truly said of man as of God, '' he is love" ; where 
it is not there is no humanity. '* Intellect without affec- 
tion" defines neither man nor God, but only the devil. 
Invest Satan with all the power of the Almighty, yet leave 
him in every other respect unchanged, and he would not 
thereby become like God, but only a thousand -fold more 
the child of hell than before. For what makes a person a 
devil and his environment a hell save the want of love? 
For where there is no love there is simply an insatiable 
selfishness, guarded by a suspicion that can never trust and 
a fear that cannot rest. The loveless man loves his own 
happiness, but that of no other being. Around him are 
multitudes who desire happiness, some asking it from him 
or seeking to attain it with him and through him ; but he, 
as void of love, desires happiness for himself alone and sacri- 
fices theirs to his, though he soon discovers that selfish 
happiness is but the lust that begets misery and turns into 
despair. And a loveless man who despairs of pleasure is 
indeed a terrible being. More ruthless than any beast of 



620 THE MISERY OF FEAR; GROWTH OF SUSPICION. 

prey, he can spoil innocence and glory in its shame ; he can 
rejoice in the pallor that steals upon the cheek once ruddy 
with health ; the cry of the orphan comes to sound like 
music in his ear; the ravages of disease and crime and death 
wake in him no pity, though they may stir the horror that 
fears for himself. And there is no misery like the misery of 
him in whom fear for self has taken the place of love for 
others, who reads danger in every human face, sees an 
enemy in every living form, who hears disaster murmured in 
every breeze, disease blown about on every wind, or death 
threatened by every exhalation. He who fears for himself 
alone will find suspicion of others so grow on him that care- 
fulness on their part will seem but a new monition of danger 
and a cause of deeper fear ; and in his dreaded yet desired 
isolation he will come to feel as if all the agony of earth 
were impersonated in his single breast. It is this that 
makes the loveless a Satanic state; for hell is created by 
the hate which begets suspicion and solitude. Where no 
being loves and every being fears, where no eye can close, 
for every other eye watches for the opportunity of gratifying 
jealousy or envy, of indulging malice or the revenge that 
lusts to murder, there is hell, and the men who make their 
home in it are devils. But if love be so necessary to man, 
what must it be to God ? The loveless Maker of a universe 
were a being we could neither revere nor adore. Yet is not 
this very inability a witness to the moral character of our 
Creator? He so made us that we could not worship an 
almighty devil, who were a being a coward might flatter, 
but no man could praise. We can love only the lovable, 
and only where love is can there be the will to do good and 
the power to accomplish it. To be without heart is to be 
able to seduce innocence without remorse; and not even 
the seduced can love the remorseless seducer. Man may 



HIGHER MAN BECOMES THE LESS NATURE CAN SATISFY HIM 62 1 

yield to the devil's temptation, but it does not follow that 
he on that account loves the devil ; nay, he may hate 
him all the more that he has not tempted in vain. God, 
then, to be a Being man can worship must be the imper- 
sonated, goodness he can admire and adore, reasonable in 
all His acts, righteous in all His works, gracious in all His 
ways. Were He less than this our souls could not be per- 
suaded to the obedience which is realized love. 



IV 

I. Such is the God needed to satisfy the higher and 
better nature in man. But that nature has this curious 
quality — the higher and better it becomes the less easily 
is it satisfied, especially in those things it does or produces 
for its own delectation. And it is not surprising that refined 
nature should be most justly dissatisfied with the work 
of its barbarous state in the highest region of thought, 
and more especially with the sort of gods it then made 
and bade man worship. It is out of this inability of man 
to satisfy nature in the matter of religion that the need 
for revelation has come; for revelation means that un- 
less God makes Himself known man will never really know 
Him, or, in other words, can never realize the perfect 
religion. For the higher our idea of God rises, the less 
can we deny to Him the power and the right of speech. 
The race that could not speak would not be rational, for 
what were reason without the gift of expression ? A dumb 
race — i.e. one without the power to make and to use lan- 
guage — would be a race without intelligence. The 
thought that cannot be uttered is thought that does not 
live. And so God in the very degree that He is reason will 
speak ; that He is righteous, will act and govern ; that He is 



622 THE STATUE WHICH NEEDED SPEECH TO BE PERFECT. 

love, will show Himself gracious. And how can He speak 
unless He addresses those who hear ? How can ^e govern 
unless He reigns over those who are able to obey ? And 
how can He be gracious unless He declare Himself to those 
who stand in need of His love ? 

But these are all personal acts, not possible of ex- 
pression save in personal forms, not capable of appre- 
hension save by persons. And this signifies that if God 
is to be revealed it must be, on the one hand, by His own 
spontaneous action, and, on the other, by the use of 
a medium which we may conceive as an objective person- 
ality to Him, and which is essentially such to us. There 
is a familiar tale of the Italian boy who became the most 
famed of sculptors, sitting long and pensively before the 
supreme work of his master, wondering, admiring, judging 
as only an artist can. The master watched the boy, and 
read in the eager yet shadowed face the verdict of posterity. 
Suddenly the lad rose and turned sadly away, murmuring to 
himself: "It needs but one thing to be perfect." Much 
did the master marvel at the boy's speech, and one day, 
seeking knowledge that he might die in peace, he asked his 
pupil: ''Michael, what did that statue of mine need to 
be perfect?" "Need, Master ? it needed speech." It had 
received from its creator's genius everything but life; and 
without that what was it but a dead and graven image ? 
And what is nature but a dumb creation with man sitting 
before her open-eyed and wondering, asking whence she 
has come and he with her? Whither he and she are to- 
gether going? She, silent and sphinx-like, answers only 
by her sculptured face and couchant figure, leaving the 
imagination of man to reply to the questions which his 
reason has asked. But God could not leave man to such a 
dumb instructrix; the creature He had made that He 



GOD SPEAKS TO US IN HIS SON 623 

might love appealed too strongly to His heart. ''The only 
begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, He de- 
clared Him.'' The men who see the Son, see the Father; 
and from Him who has ever lived in God, they learn to 
know what God is. 

2. If the revelation of God must be through a person, 
then where in all history can we find so suitable a personal 
medium as Jesus Christ, one whose manhood is so calcu- 
lated to make our conception of God more sublime and 
gracious ? The character of the interpreter adds its finest 
qualities to His interpretation. We believe that He lived 
in God and we seek God through Him ; the affinity of His 
manhood with God brings Deity near us, while the afiinity 
of our manhood with His lifts us nearer to Deity. As the 
medium of revelation He is like the great aerial ocean which 
floats round and enfolds our earth ; without it gravitation 
could not exercise its mystic power, binding mass to mass, 
planet to sun and system to system, and making of immen- 
sity a shoreless sea in which worlds sail more noiselessly 
and sure than were they guided by rudder and compass; 
without it the light and heat which the sun flings from his 
burning face would never visit us and change our cold earth 
from a dwelling of death into the home of rational life. 
Why He is qualified to be so lucid a medium is expressed 
in His very name; He is ''the Son," or, as the Te Deum 
has it, "the everlasting Son of the Father." The two 
notions are inseparable ; where the Father is the Son must 
be; if we had no "everlasting Son" we could have no 
essential or eternal Father. And each is as the other is. 
The machine witnesses to the skill of the mechanic; the 
pupil to the learning or genius of the master; the son to 
the character and qualities of the father. The gentleness, 
the grace, the sternness, the patience, the inflexible 



624 WHAT SOVEREIGNTY AND FATHERHOOD SIGNIFY. 

integrity towards men which mark the One distinguish 
also the Other. There were men who were wont to argue as 
if God's Fatherhood signified mere indulgent good nature, 
as if His goodness prevented Him from being a cause of 
suffering and would not even allow Him to see a creature 
suffer ; and they forgot that Jesus could be fierce as well as 
gentle, angry as well as gracious, and that man could by 
his sin not, indeed, punish God, yet inflict upon Him the 
sorest suffering. Then there were other men who, on the 
contrary, argued as if God were so severe and austere that 
while the insult of the sinner's sin moved Him to anger, 
the misery of the sinner's state did not touch Him with 
pity. Thus a distinguished and subtle divine defined 
Sovereignty and Fatherhood, when predicated of Deity, as, 
respectively, titles of nature and of grace ; God as Sovereign 
having over against all men rights He must enforce, but 
as Father duties of tenderness and care which were proper 
only to His own; and one who heard Him discourse on 
this distinction said ''that man would take from God all 
that makes Him divine and gracious. ' ' But there could not 
be a more unreal antithesis, for the father who is not a 
sovereign and never enforces his authority and rights, is 
but the shiftless head of a shiftless family. There is indeed 
nothing so mischievous in public politics or in private 
morals as the easy good nature which fears the giving of 
pain too much to be able to punish wrong. And the 
sovereign who is not the conscious father of his people is 
no just king, but is an owner and a disposer of chattels rather 
than a ruler of men. In God these two constitute a noble 
unity, all His paternal acts are regal, all His regal functions 
are paternal. An emasculated Deity, incapable of the 
anger that burns like a consuming fire against iniquity and 
oppression, were no Deity fit to hold the reins of a wicked 



GOD ONE YET MANIFOLD; HIS ATTRIBUTES 625 

and guilty world; and a pitiless God who never saw the 
pathos of the sinner's lot, whether he sins against his will 
or in the flowing tide of irresistible inclination, is not equal 
to the sovereignty of a fallen race. The two functions 
need then to be sublimed into a fine and balanced harmony 
that God may reign in love and yet man be saved from 
his sin. 



V 

I. But though these functions constitute a unity, they 
express also a difference. God is one, but He has an in- 
finity of attributes, every attribute denoting a distinct 
quality in the Divine character, or a special aspect in the 
Divine relations. And so here the sovereign is concerned 
with authority and law, but the father with the child and 
his obedience. The first thought of the purely legal mon- 
arch is order, and how to maintain it ; the first thought of the 
regal parent is the family and how to preserve it. The 
relations and acts of the sovereign are impersonal and 
juridical, but those of the father are personal and ethical. 
The former enforces law that he may vindicate justice and 
uphold order; the latter maintains authority that he^may 
discipline and benefit his children. The sovereign honours 
the law by punishing the transgressors, and in order to do 
this he builds a prison that so far from reforming may only 
further corrupt and deprave the wrongdoer; but the father 
vindicates authority by chastisement, which is distin- 
guished from penalty by seeking not so much to create fear 
of law and of its majesty as to reclaim the disobedient and 
uplift the fallen. The one regards the whole, the other the 
persons who compose it. The sovereign says: "I imper- 
sonate the law without which there would be no society and 

2S 



626 NOT GODLIKE TO VIOLATE LAW. 

no state, no justice between man and man, no fear of wrong 
and unfaithfulness, no security for property and no guar- 
dianship of rights." But the father says: ''I am the em- 
bodied providence of the family, toil for it, spin for it, think 
of all its members, help all and love all, especially the help- 
less, the unloved and the unlovable." 

2. But the very difference in the functions makes their 
unity and concurrence in God the more needful to the 
seemliness of His action. It would not be Godlike to 
save by being unjust to law, any more than it would be 
godly in us to think of His majesty to the neglect of His 
grace. We can as little imagine that it would become 
God to save the guilty by doing indignity to justice, vio- 
lating order or tarnishing right, as to conceive that it would 
be agreeable to Him to think that He magnified justice by 
forgetting mercy and dealing pitilessly by the miserable 
mortals who could not choose but sin. Sovereignty is as 
normal as fatherhood, fatherhood as normal as sovereignty; 
and it is by showing their complete and indefeasible unity 
that the Christian redemption so glorifies God. If He had 
not been Sovereign, man would never have needed reconcili- 
ation to Him; if He had not been Father, the means of 
reconciliation never could have been found. The sover- 
eignty which loves law, upholds justice, and institutes order, 
could not have winked at sin or benignly smiled on the 
transgressor ; the fatherhood which has a heart for men and 
pity for the forlorn could not have allowed red-handed 
vengeance to work its will upon a fallen race. But if 
without the sovereignty there would have been no need 
for a Redeemer, yet if there had been nothing else He would 
not have been possible. For law has power to punish, but 
none to save; justice has the will to vindicate the denied 
authority, but not to deliver the denier; and so the God 



STANDARDS FOR EVANGELICAL DECISION 627 

who has only regal rights and legal instruments could never 
have permitted the guilty to escape, let alone have pro- 
vided the means for its attainment. But with the Father- 
hood there could not but be a Redeemer, and redemption 
by suffering; for the sin of the child is the sorrow of the 
parent. And is there anything so absolutely irrepressible 
as the grief that would die to save the son who has been its 
cause ? 

3. The positions thus reached are fundamental, and 
ought to supply us with standards for the appraisement 
of cardinal evangelical doctrines, (i) The Father and the 
Son cannot be placed in opposition; they agree in will, 
though they differ in function. The Son is not the rival, 
but the agent of the Father; He does not cancel, but fulfils 
the purposes of the Sovereign. (ii) The work which ex- 
presses the common will is as much the Father's as the 
Son's. His blood does not purchase the Divine love, for 
the love that could be bought by blood were not divine; 
but it expresses the sorrow of Him who gave, the suffering 
of Him who was given, and the sacrifice which was made by 
both, (iii) The sovereign, though he may will the good of 
the law-breaker, yet cannot save him by breaking the law 
himself, for that would be to gratify pity at the expense of 
order and all it stands for ; the father, though he may feel 
hindered by authority and may hate the shame of penalty, 
yet must regard their rights, for to do otherwise would be 
to make himself the slave of the wrongdoer and the ap- 
prover of the wrong he does. The common suffering of 
Father and Son is a joint homage to the sovereignty; their 
union in sacrifice is the witness to the fatherhood, (iv) 
The eternal and essential unity expressed in ''the only 
begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father" is fulfilled 
and realized under historical conditions when Christ so did 



628 THE REGULATIVE PRINCIPLE OF THOUGHT AND CONDUCT. 

the Father's will as, on the one hand, to reconcile man to 
God, and, on the other hand, to incline and qualify man to 
do what is well pleasing in His sight. (v) As the Son be- 
came the standard regulative of Christian conduct. He also 
becomes the principle regulative of Christian thought. 
That principle is to the Greek the orthodoxy of the church ; 
to the Roman its infalHbility as embodied in the Pope and 
articulated by him; to the Lutheran justification by faith, 
which, as it is accepted or denied, decides whether a church 
shall stand or fall ; to the Reformed, who was here the more 
radical and so nearer the truth, it was the gracious will and 
character of God. ' ' The grace ' ' of the reformed divine was 
indeed not always gracious, but he did right in beginning 
not with any special church or any personal doctrine, 
but with the God who was the source of all religion and 
the matter of all thought. There, too, we would begin, 
not indeed with the God of a nature ''red in tooth and 
claw," or with the absolute and the abstract, which is the 
Deity of philosophy, but with the God the Son declared. 
Where He placed us there we stand, and look at God through 
His eyes, and at man with a vision He has clarified and en- 
larged; and we come to understand how it is that when 
man sinned God could not but suffer, and how His sufTering 
became a sacrifice which reconciles the guilty to the All- 
Good. And so we come to see how profoundly true is the 
word of Paul: — "Christ Jesus is made unto us of God, 
wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemp- 
tion, that it may be according as it is written. He that 
glorieth, let him glory in the Lord." 



INDEX 



The Index needs to be studied in connection with the very full Table of Contents. 



Abelard, 75 

-^stheticism, 426 

Agnosticism, 73, 81, 105 

Ainsworth, Henry, 218, 221 n., 236 

a Kempis, Thomas, 58, 408 

Ambrose, 75 

Anglican Church, 6, in, 116, 118, 
123, 136, 141, 157, 208-12, 225, 
229 ; its relation to the State, 240-1, 
411-13; the polity of, 120, 122; 
Sacerdotalism in, 120-22, 123 

Anglo-Catholic movement, 117, 137 

Anselm, 57 

Antioch, the Church at, 495-501 

Apocalypse, the, 162, 442^588, 590 

Apocalyptic Literature, 442-4 

ApoUos, 546 

Apostles, the, 19, 285, 300, 301-5 

— education of the, 373-82 

— Acts of the, its author and his 
characteristics, 516-19; his attitude 
to Greeks, 525-30 ; relation of Acts 
to Pauline epistles, 527 n. 

Apostolic Constitutions, 193 
Apostolic Succession, 121, 404 
Aquila, 533, 545 
Aquinats, Thomas, 57, 75 
Aramaic in N.T., 355, 383, 387, 574 
Aristotle, 81, 145 n., 327 
Arnold, M., 77, 85, 86, 170 
Art and Religion, 73, 259-63 
Athanasius, 75, 107, 233, 234 
Athleticism, 426 

Augustine, St., 37, 75, 200, 276, 407-8, 
610 

— of Canterbury, 183 n., 277 
Authority, 136 



B 
Bacon, Francis, 237, 396 
Baptism, 121 
Baptists, 236 
Barnabas, 136, 165, 494-5, 498, 501, 

503-5, 518-24 
Barrowe and Greenwood, 2IO, 219 n., 

235 

Barrowe, Henry, 217 

Greenwood, John, 217 
Baur, Ferdinand, 185 n., 249, 517 n., 

518, 527 n. 
Baxter, R., 278, 409 
Benson, E. W., 193 
Bernard, St., of ClairvauXj 58, 107, 

587 
Bible, 294, 419 
Bishops, 120-22; in early Church, 

132, 164, 168 

— in Apostolic Constitutions, 193 

— in Clementine Literature and Ig- 

natian Epistles, 177-79 
Boethius, 327 
Bridge, William, 236 
Browne, Robert, 216 n., 234-5 
Browning, Robert, 72, 514 
Brownism, as contrasted with Puritan- 
ism, 217 n. 
Buddha, 394 
Bunyan, 278, 409 
Burke, E., 366 
Burnet, 112 n., 114 
Busher, L., on " Religious Peace," 236 
Butler, Bishop, 76 



Calvin, 107, 277, 278, 407, 409 
Carlyle, 58 



629 



630 



INDEX 



Cartwright, Thomas, 2o8, 211, 21711., 

409 
Catholicism, 137; see under Roman 

Church 
Celsus, 38, 53, 75, 85, 86, 406 
Chalmers, Thomas, 472 n. 
Charlemagne, 55 n. 

Charles II., 112 n., 1 13, 152, 213,241 
ChiHingworth, Wm., 237, 238 n. 
Christian Ethics, 198-201, 420 

— Idea of God, 90, 92, 138, 613-21 ; 

Place of Revelation in, 621 seq 

— Idea of man, 92 

— Religion in first century, 3-46 ; 

the ideal period of its history, 7 ; 
its missions, 17 ; its conflict with 
Rome, 39 ; and Judaism, 170 ; in 
the nineteenth century, 47-108 ; 
attitude of cultured towards, 72 ; 
and working-classes, 77, 95 

Christian worship, 264 seq. 

Christianity and Science, 90 

Christianity and Capital and Labour, 
98, 425, 426 

Church, the, and the churches, 3, 
410-14 ; the ideal of, 4 ; and Ancient 
Heathenism, 53; as political Power, 
55; -the making of, 306-21; and 
State, 55 n., 152, 424; and the 
future, 64 ; its enthusiasm for hu- 
manity, 93 ; its right to be, loi ; 
its beginnings, 132 ; the churches 
and the kingdom, 134 ; the word 
"church" in its usage at the Re- 
formation, 145 n, ; Church in contrast 
with Temple, 258 ; the idea in teach- 
ing of Jesus, 371-431 ; the constitu- 
ents of, 393 seq. ; Christ, the creative 
energy in, 404-10 ; the Invisible, 
410 ; the historical churches, 41 1-14 ; 
as theincarnationofChrist as prophet, 
priest, and king, 415-23 

Cicero, 200 

Clement of Alexandria, 166, 193 n., 406 

Clement of Rome, 75, 176, 177, 189 n. 

Clementines, 166 n., 179-83, 185 

Coleridge, S. T., 62 

Comte, 87 

Confucius, 394 



Congregational Ideal (see Independ- 
ence), iii, 143; meaning of term, 
144-5 5 the early ideal, 214, 225 ; 
not sacerdotal, 227 
Constantine and the Church, 55 n., 234 
Cranmer, Thomas, 145 n., 409 
Criticism of the N.T., 247-52 
Cromwell, Oliver, iii, 112, 230 
Cross, doctrine of the, 24-31, 446, 

452-57 
Cudworth, 238 n. 
Cyprian, 75, 185, 193, 201, 405 n. 

D 

Dante, 39 n., 58, 396, 408 

Death of Jesus Christ, 371, 373, 
445-68 

Deism, 60, 80 

Democritus, 81 

diKaioaijpr], 347 ; Paul's usage as com- 
pared with Matthew's, 359-60 

Disciples, the, of the Lord, 286, 288-9, 

296-305, 311 
Doctrine, Christian, 196-8, 419 
Dogma and Doctrine, 250 
Duns Scotus, 57 



Eastern Church, 411-12, 424 

Ecclesiastical Polity and the Religion 
of Christ, 142-75, 195 ; Autocracies, 
151 ; Presbyterian Polity, 152 ; 
'* Communal" Polity, 155; how 
to be judged, 155 ; Monarchical and 
Republican, 156 ; growth of, 194 

Ecclesiastical Polity, and Christian 
Doctrine, 196-8 

Ecclesiastical Polity and Christian 
Ethics, 198-201 

Edwards, Jonathan, 410, 449 n. 

€KKX7]cria, 145, 169, 203, 378, 382-8 ; 
its usage in Hellenistic Greek, 385 n. ; 
how it ought to be translated, 
389-92 

Ephesus, 546, 552-6 

Epictetus, 34, 75 

Epicurus, 82 

Episcopacy, 118, 151, 168, 182; De- 
velopment of, in early Church, 183 



INDEX 



631 



Episcopate, 122, 164 
Erasmus, 409 

Established Churches, 103, 141 
Eucharist, 121, 276 
Evangelical Revival, 116 
Evolution and Ethics, 92 
— and Religion, 87 



Fatherhood of God, 129 

filioqiie, 41I-12 

Fox, George, 409 

Free Churches, 4, 103, 105, 127 ; their 

ideals, 140, 421-3 
Freedom, its distinction from Liberty, 

422-3 
Fuller, Thos., 208, 210, 217 n. 



Galatians, Epistle to the, 499, 500, 

519 ; analysis of, 521-4 n. 
Gale, Theophilus, 1 14 
Galilee, as scene of Jesus' ministry in 

first and second periods, 287-8, 433-7 
Gallio, 534-5, 566-9 
Gamaliel, 486-7 

Gardiner, S. R., on Puritans, 209 n. 
Gardner, Professor P., 437 
Gauden, Bishop, 114 
Geneva and the Reformation, 206-7 
Gibbon, 36, 37, 39 n., 53 
Goethe, 83 

Goodvi^in, Thomas, 1 14 
Gore, Bishop, 163 n. 
Gospel, the Fourth, 's.qq. \xxAtx John the 

Apostle 
Gospels Synoptic, Lord's Prayer in 

Matthevi^ and Luke compared, 352 n. , 

355 '■> genealogies in Matthew and 

Luke, 593 ; birth-stories in Matthew 

and Luke, 594 
Greenwood, John, see under Barrowe 

and Greenwood 
Gregory VII, 56 n. 
Guyon, Madam, 587 



H 

Hales, John, 409 

Harnack, Adolf, 39 n. , 163 n. 



Harington, James, 396 

Hartmann, Von, 95 

Hatch's Bampton Lectures, 162, 168 n. 

Hebrews, Epistle to the, 1 59 

Hegesippus, 166-7 

Helvetius, 335 

Helwys, Thomas, 236 

Hermas, 177 

High Church, 124 

Hilary of Poictiers, 233 

Hippolytus, 192 

Hobbes, Thomas, 148 n. 

Holm, Adolf, 521 n. 

Homer, 81 

Hooker, R., 149 n., 222-6, 278, 409 

Hort, F. J. A., 389 

Howe, John, 107, 114, 276, 278 

Hugo, of St. Victor, 56 n. 

Hume, David, 281, 472 n. 

Hyde, Lawrence, 1 12 n. 

I 

Ignatian Epistles, 178-81 

Ignatius, 184 n. 

Incarnation, 428-30 

Independence, iii, 1 18-19, I44> 
147-9 n., 214 n., 219 n., 221 n., 
227, 412-13 ; its conception of religion 
in relation to the State, 229 ; its 
strength, the interpretation of reli- 
gion, 230, 234 ; toleration, a 
creation of, 236-8 ; action of, on 
the State, 239-41 

Individualism in Russia, 424 

Intellect, modern, and Christianity, 87 

Irenseus, 75, 180, 186 



Jacob, Henry, 147 n., 219, 221 n., 

235. 236 
James, the Lord's brother, 164-7, i8l, 

572 
Jerome, 405 n., 521 n. 
Jerusalem, as scene of Jesus' ministry 

in third period, 287-8, 433-6 ; see 

under Paul. 
Jesus, 8 ; His mission, 12, 107 ; the 

founding of the church, 132, 283- 

305 ; the Kingdom of God, 134, 169, 



632 



INDEX 



283 ; Jesus and Sacerdotalism, 158 ; 
the Priesthood of Christ in the 
Epistle to the Hebrews, 159 ; an 
impersonated moral law, 173 ; the 
ethics of, 175 ; as preacher, 277, 
318-21 ; the obscurity of the life of, 
283-5 ; the three periods of the 
ministry of, 286-8 ; the ministry in 
Galilee, 308-12 ; teaching in the 
Synagogue, 312-15 ; His exclusion 
from the synagogues, 314 ; in con- 
troversy with the Pharisees, 315-18 ; 
the teaching of, in first period, 
322-70 ; accused of being a revolu- 
tionary, 338-40 ; the moral authority 
of Jesus, 341-6, 370; philanthropy, 
the creation of, 348-51 ; on Fast- 
ing, 357; on Mammon - worship, 
361-3 ; Jesus by nature no man of 
sorrows, 364-7 ; on the law of 
retaliation, 367-9 ; the teaching of 
Jesus in His middle period, 371-431 ; 
the parables of, 371-2; Peter's con- 
fession, 374-6 ; His idea of the 
church, 382 seq. ; idea of church 
begins with, 388 ; His action in the 
church, 392 ; method of, in found- 
ing the church, 400-3 ; magnanimity 
of, 413 ; kingly function of, 421-3 ; 
as Redeemer and Judge, 430-1 ; the 
teaching of, in its third period — the 
death of Jesus, 432-68 ; His apoca- 
lyptic teaching, 444-5 ; the Last 
Supper, 446-7 ; attitude of Priests 
to, 448-53 ; the meaning of the cross 
to, 465-8 ; Jesus and Paul, 469-74, 
478-81 ; John's interpretation of 
Jesus, as Son of God, 583-5 

John, the Apostle, 107, 302-4, 577-91 ; 
John and Paul, 577-9 ; John and 
Peter, 579-81 ; John as friend and 
interpreter of Jesus, 581-5 ; charac- 
teristics of Fourth Gospel, 585 ; his 
mysticism and symbolism, 588 ; the 
prologue of the Fourth Gospel, 592- 
602 ; the history of Jesus as written 
by John, 602-9 

John of Salisbury, 56 n. 

John Mark, 504, 518, 520 



Johnson, Francis, 218, 221 n. 

Josephus, 164, 167 

Judaism, 170-2, 175, 306, 335, 349, 

438-40, 471, 487 
Julian, 75 

Justin Martyr, T^, 186, 193 n., 521 n. 
Juvenal, 34, 75 

K 

Kant, 76 

Kepler, 94 

/f770as, 377 

Kingdom of God, 134, 326-36, 347- 
58 ; in its fundamental idea, 358- 
67 ; and its duties, 367-70 ; grow- 
ing emphasis on the "kingdom" 
in second period of Jesus' teaching, 
371 ; various usages of term in the 
Gospels, 371 n. 

kXtjpos, 186 

Knollys, Hanserd, 236 

KvptaKov, 384, 390, 391 



Lactantius, 233 

Lambeth Articles, 209 n. 

Laud, III, 124 

" Laymen," 204 

Legarde, 470 n. 

Leibniz, 76 

Leo X, 58 

Liberty, 422-8 

Lightfoot's essay on the "Christian 

Ministry," 164, 168, 172 ; on the 

Episcopacy, 183 n. ; on Clement of 

Rome, 189 n. 
Locke, John, 149 n., 238 
Loisy, 359 
Lord's Supper, 276 
Lucian, 38, 53, 75 
Lucretius, 38, 81, 82, 87 
Luther, 107, 145 n., 200, 277, 389, 

409, 418 
Lutheran Church, 411-13, 628 

M 

Maccabees, 291, 436, 443 
Magistrate, his power and function, as 

conceived by Puritan and Separatist, 

210 



INDEX 



633 



Marcus Aurelius, 34, 35, 53, 54, 75 
Matthias the Apostle, 135 
Mechanical Theory of Universe, 88, 

94 
Melville, Andrew, 102 n. 
Mill, J. S.'s autobiography, 611-13 
Milton, John, 5, 108, 113, 148 n., 153, 

154, 230, 379, 396, 409, 421 
Minister, the, 281-2, 417-18, 420 
Miracles, Celsus and Renan on, 85 
Missions of Christianity, 277 
Morality and Religion, 170 
More, Sir Thomas, 396, 406 
Murton on Persecution, 236 



N 

Naturalism, 80, 81, 88 

Nature, the physicist's view of, 402 

Neander, 187 

Newman, J. H., 278 

New Testament, writers, 246 ; critical 
study of, 247-8 ; the various ways 
of studying critically, 249-52 

Nonconformity, 5, 424 ; see under 
Separatists 

Nye, Philip, 236 



Origen, 75, 406, 523 n., 187 
Owen, John, 1 14 



Paley, 335 

Pantsenus, 406 

Pascal, 284 

Pastoral Epistles, 132 

Paul, 14, 22-4, 75, 107, 135, 161, 165; 
righteousness as conceived by Paul 
and Matthew, 359-60 ; Paul, the 
Apostle of Jesus Christ, 469-502 ; 
the call of, 474-8, 489 ; religious 
environment of, in Tarsus, 481-4 ; 
in Jerusalem, 484-9, 496 ; Paul and 
Stephen, 488 ; in Arabia, 489 ; 
again, in Jerusalem, 490 ; in Tarsus, 
492-3, 496 ; Barnabas and Paul, 
494~S > his ministry in Antioch, 
496-9 ; missionary journeys, 498, 



506, 508-9, 518-24, 529-36; his 
mission to the Gentiles, 496-502, 
506 ; Paul in Europe, 503-44 ; Paul 
and the Apostles at Jerusalem, 499- 
503 ; separation of Paul and Barna- 
bas, 503-5 ; Paul and Silas, 506, 508 ; 
Paul in Asia Minor, 508-10, 518-24; 
the man of Macedonia, 512-15 ; 
Paul's love for the Jews, 514-15; 
attitude of the Jews to, 518-24, 529, 
534 ; his conception of Gentiles, 
525-77 ; in Athens, 530-33 ; in 
Corinth, and the Epistles written 
there, 533-7; Paul and Aquila, 533; 
characteristics, as revealed in the 
Epistles, 539-44; in Asia, and in 
prison, 545-76 ; in Ephesus, 546, 
552-6; the controversy concerning 
Gentiles, 570-4 ; Paul and John, 
577-9 

Pauline Epistles, 42, 478-81, 535-44; 
to the Galatians, 521-4 n. ; i Corin- 
thians, 547-51 n. ; 2 Corinthians, 
556 ; Romans, 557-66 ; of the cap- 
tivity, 575-6 

Pearson, Bishop, 114 

Pelagius, 407-8 

Penry, John, 217, 220 n. 

Pessimism, 95, 330 

Peter the Apostle, 75, 107, 301, 356 ; 
his confession and its meaning, 
374-82; meaning of "Thou art 
Peter," 377; Peter and John, 579- 
81 

Ilerpos, 377 

Peter the Lombard, 57 

Pharisees, the, 287, 293-6, 438-40, 
470, 485-6 : their notion of the law, 
307 ; their controversies with Jesus, 
315-18, 319, 341-6; Christ's judg- 
ment of, 441 

Pilate, 451 

Plato, 34, 81, 145 n., 146 n., 327, 395 

Pliny, the elder, 39, 75 

Plotinus, 75, 407 

Plutarch, 75 

Polycarp, 75, 178 

Polybius, 521 n. 

Porphyry, 75 



634 



INDEX 



Preaching, 275-82 ; its effects in history, 
277 seq. ; preaching in Scotland, 
278-81 ; the prophetic function of 
the Church, 418-21 

Presbyterian Polity, 152, 210, 212, 
412-13 

Priest, 121, 133, 157, 187, 204; in the 
time of Christ, 289-93 

Priesthood of all believers, 138, 188, 
201, 227 : of the Church, 416-18 

Primitive Christianity, 161, 168, 177, 
497 

Providence of God, 129-30 

Psalm,eighty-fourth, the, interpretation 
of, 254-7 

Puritan idea of Church, 130-1 

Puritanism, 109-41 ; the New, 118, 136 

Puritans, Whitgift on, 208 ; as distin- 
guished from Anglican and Separa- 
tist, 209-12 

Pusey, E. B., 405 



Ramsay, Sir W. M., 41 n., 521 n. 
Rationalism in eighteenth century, 60 
Reason and Revelation, 89, 610-28 
Reformation, 58, 206-7, 278 ; see 

Religion of Christ 
Reformers, Continental and English, 

205 
Regulative principles of Christianity, 99 
Religion of Christ and Ecclesiastical 

Polity, 142-75 

— and Catholicism, 176-204 

— and the Reformation, 205-41 
Renaissance, 80 

Renan, 37 n., 38 n., 85, %"] , lOi 
Restoration, the Church of, 1 12-16 
Resurrection of Jesus, 85, 431, 451, 590 
Revolution, the (in England), 115 
Ritschl, 167 n., 187 
Robinson, John, 218, 221 n., 235, 236 
Roman Church, 6, loi, 104, 151, 157, 
170, 229, 379-82, 411-12, 628 

— Empire, 32 ; its ethics and religion, 
34 

Rome and modern England, 70 



Sacerdotalism, 109-41, 186, 201 ; the 

New Sacerdotalism, 118; evangelical 

purpose in revival of, 125 ; criticism 

of, 126, 176 
Sacraments, iio, 121, 130, 201 
Sadducees, the, 287, 289-93, 34i> 43^- 

42, 486 
Sanderson, Bishop of Lincoln, 209 n. 
Schelling, 403 
Schmeidel, 516 n, 
Schopenhauer, 330 
Science and Religion, Ti^^ 90, 91 
Science, modern, 82 
Scotch preachers, 278-81 
Secularism, 99 
Seeley, Sir J. R., 89 
Selden, 148 n. 
Seneca, 34, 75, 534, 567 
Separatists, 208, 212-22 
Sermon on the Mount, 308, 314, 322- 

70, 440 

— 1st Session : The Beatitudes, 326-36 

— 2nd Session : The preservative and 
illuminative function of the dis- 
ciples, 336-8 

— 3rd Session : Theauthority of Jesus, 
341-6 

— 4th Session: The "kingdom" as 
an institution for worship of God, 
347-58 _ 

Meaning of "righteousness" in 
sermon, 347-8 

— 5th Session: The "kingdom" in 
its fundamental idea, 358-67 

— 6th Session : The "kingdom" and 
its duties, 367-70 

Sheldon, Archbishop, 1 14 

Sidney, Algernon, 396 

Sin and suffering, 455-7 

Smith, Adam, 157, 472 n. 

Smith, John, the Cambridge Platonist, 

333 
Smith, W. Robertson, 250 n. 
Socrates, 146 n. 

" Son of God," 374-6, 430, 473, 513 
•'Son of Man," 371, 430, 444, 513 
South, Robert, 112 n., 1 14 
Spencer, Herbert, 76, %i^ 95 



INDEX 



635 



cirepfioKbyoi, 41 n. 
Spinoza, 80, 327 
Statius, 534 
Strabo, 38, 521 n. 
Strauss, 87, 249 
cvvayoiyii, 145 n. 

T 

Tacitus, 68, 71, 75. 

Tauler, 58, 587 

Taylor, Jeremy, 238, 265, 278 

Temple, Jewish, contrasted with Chris- 
tian Church, 258 

Tennyson and Christianity, 72 

Tertullian, 54, 75, 185, I90-2, 232, 
234, 405 

Theistic view of universe, 88 

Thomas the Apostle, 607 

Timothy, 522-4, 534, 543 

Toleration, in England, 150, 235-8; 
Lecky on, 231 

Tolstoi, 424 

Tubingen School, 442, 517 n. 

U 
Universe, mechanical theory of, 88, 
94 ; theistic view of, 88 



Unknowable, the, 84 

V 
Varro, 37 

Version, Authorised, 348 
Version, Revised, 347 
Virgil, 39 n. 
Voltaire, 76, 467 

W 

Walker, Clement, 148 n. 
Watson, E. W., Professor, 193 n. 
Watts, Isaac, 278, 391 n. 
Wellhausen, 377 n., 378 n., 387, 392 n. , 

442, 525 n. 
Wesley, John, 278, 410 
Whiifield, George, 278 
Whitgift, Archbishop, 207, 208, 209 n., 

211, 218 n., 219 n. 
Williams, Roger, 236 
Worldliness, 268 
Worship, 253-82; praise, 271-3; 

prayer, 273-5 5 preaching, 275-82 



Zeitgeist, the problems of, 6'jy 79, 2>6 
Zwingli, 277, 278 



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